Basic image searching: search engines and image-hosting sites

[bunniewabbit.livejournal.com]

Search Engines

Most everyone knows how to "google" things; search engines definitely have their uses for image searching, but they can be a bit limiting: they are not up-to-the-minute, for one thing, and the results don't change much (if at all) from day to day. I've had good luck from time to time using them, though, so I'm going to pass on what I can about making the best use possible of these tools. I'm not an expert at it, but maybe some of you can contribute tips that I've never thought of, myself (feel free to leave them in the comments, to be edited into the entry later, or save them up for an entry of your own).

My favorites are Google Image Search and Yahoo Search. I turn off safe searching (I don't think it really gets me any more of what I'm looking for, but why risk it?), which you can do by clicking "Advanced Search." (Just as a side note: you can also use the Advanced Search to limit your results to only large images, or black & white images, etc.) I've tried other engines, but I haven't found that they get me anything that these two don't.

The words you use to search can make a big difference, of course. Here is a list of words I've used with varying degrees of success: elijah, elijah wood, elwood, lijah, lij, frodo, hobbit. It sometimes works to spell things "wrong" from time to time: both "elija" and "elijiah" are common misspellings of his name (though they are both usually "correct" for the user, depending on their native language. "Elijiah" turns up on Russian sites quite a bit, for example). Likewise, "hobbit" can turn up as "hobbitt" and other variations. "Froto" occasionally appears. Use your imagination. Mostly, I stick with elijah, elijah wood, and frodo, and I do just fine.

Then there are film names and events that can be used either alone or in combination with "elijah". Googling 'elijah "paris je t'aime"' will get you different results from using just the film name. 'elijah paris' is worth a try, as well. And remember that his name is not always connected with the image, so googling with the film or event name alone can sometimes yield treasures.

Now, here's the tricky part: I sometimes follow links from Google images into random websites and poke around. I don't know how I can teach anyone to do this, as it's really just chance whether I'll find anything or not. But, just as an example, several weeks ago I googled 'paris je t'aime' and something (that I can't even remember now) compelled me to click on the link, which lead me to a French site. Now, I don't speak French, but a couple of intuitive clicks later and I'd stumbled onto some gigantic, glorious, really spoilery stills from Elijah's segment. And I probably couldn't find them again if I tried.

Image Hosting Sites

These are the sites used by ordinary folks to store/share their photographs. These are a great place to find fan snapshots from random encounters, events, or just shots of Elijah walking down the street.

The best one for searching is Flickr. When you search there, type in your search word (and remember to try some of the ones that I listed in the previous section), and when the page opens, click "most recent" under the text that says: "We found 10,343 photos about elijah." o_O That will give you the most recently-uploaded (though not necessarily the most recent) photos. I once commented in my LJ that there are wa-a-ay too many pets named Frodo and babies named Elijah. And they're all on Flickr. Yeesh.

When you find something, make sure you click the "All Sizes" link above the photograph, if it is available: this will take you to a page where you can choose to save THE REALLY GARGANTUAN VERSION or the more reasonable size (though I'm unfamiliar with this latter version. You'll have to let me know what it's like). ;-)

A note about saving images on Flickr (also applies to other sites that protect their images, like >IMDb): sometimes the images will be protected, and if you try to right-click-save them, you'll get nothing more than a dot labeled "spaceball" on your hard drive. However, it is still possible to... borrow the image in a couple of different ways. The first is to use your "Print Screen" keyboard function, and then import the image from the clipboard into your graphics program. The second is to use your graphics program to acquire the image with a "screen grab" (assuming your graphics program has this function. If not, the first method should work for you). Then, just crop the screen shot to the image, save it with an appropriate filename, and voilá: stolen property a new image to share! This, of course, also works on other websites where it is not possible to save the images using the traditional method.

EDITED TO ADD: Here is a nifty trick you can use if your browser is Firefox -- when you find a blocked image like this one, right-click on the page and select "View page info." Under the "Media" tab, you should be able to find the address of the image, which you can copy and paste into your browser window and get this. Then it's just a matter of tweaking the address by removing the "?v=0" and adding "_o" to the end of the file name and you get THIS. Pretty cool, huh?

EDIT 2: If you use Internet Explorer, you can right-click the page and choose "Show source code", and on that page use the "find" function to search for "jpg" until you find the URL for the image you want. Copy/paste that into your browser, and then you can right-click-save it. Thanks to karin_woywod for that tip!

Other image hosting sites where I've had limited success include Photobucket, Webshots, Buzznet and Multiply. Not much shows up on these, but they're worth searching every few months or so.

That's it for today's lesson. Again, feel free to add your ideas, tips and experiences in your comments!