Mountain View, California — In an effort to keep pace with the industry trend, Google Image Search has gone beyond similar offering from Yahoo. Google has formally added a Creative Commons filter to Image Search. Users can now filter image search results according to usage rights, for example, whether they are available for reuse, commercial reuse, reuse with modification, or commercial use with modification.
The options as shown in the image below , appears in Advanced Search, and lets users to choose filter for images whether they are permitted to reuse with attribution, modify or use it commercially.
Users can now choose one of four license filters for images on Google image search.
About a month and a half ago, Yahoo added a Creative Commons license filter to its own Image Search — but the major drawback in that case is that filter only incorporates results from Flickr, a photo sharing site Yahoo owns.
Now, Google has added a “Creative Commons” filtering capability to its own Image Search that is only accessible via advanced URL parameters.
Google is including a number of licensing methods including Creative Commons, GNU Free Documentation license, and items that are in the public domain. Its system for determining the rights on various shots is not foolproof though, and as such the company is recommending that those who are interested in republishing or reworking any of the images check with the content owner first (if possible).
However, Google, for its part, has dismissed any Picasa-only promotion and is letting users apply its four filter options — “labeled for reuse,” “labeled for commercial reuse,” “labeled for reuse with modification,” and “labeled for commercial reuse with modification” – to everything on the Web.
Addition of Creative Commons filtering on the Image Search user interface (UI) will surely stimulate use of the feature, and provide on-line content providers and advertisers with a forum to search for images they can legitimately use at no cost.
Meanwhile, if someone wants a photo from elsewhere, there are several search tools that let users quickly seek out images that can be reused and remixed including the Creative Commons search engine, Flickr, Blip.tv, ArtistServer, The Internet Archive, Wikihow, and Wikipedia.