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posted by martyb on Saturday February 17 2018, @01:13AM   Printer-friendly
from the waiting-for-an-addon-in-1..2..3.. dept.

Google settled a lawsuit with Getty Images and announced a multiyear global licensing deal with the company. One part of the settlement is the removal of the "View Image" buttons in Google Images searches. This is not entirely crippling, as you can still usually open the largest version of the image using your web browser's context menu:

Google is making a change to image search today that sounds small but will have a big impact: it's removing the "view image" button that appeared when you clicked on a picture, which allowed you to open the image alone. The button was extremely useful for users, since when you're searching for a picture, there's a very good chance that you want to take it and use it for something. Now, you'll have to take additional steps to save an image.

The change is essentially meant to frustrate users. Google has long been under fire from photographers and publishers who felt that image search allowed people to steal their pictures, and the removal of the view image button is one of many changes being made in response. A deal to show copyright information and improve attribution of Getty photos was announced last week and included these changes.

Google is also removing "Search by Image" buttons, requiring users to drag an image into the search bar instead.

Also at Search Engine Land and 9to5Google.


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  • (Score: 2, Disagree) by darkfeline on Saturday February 17 2018, @01:57AM (9 children)

    by darkfeline (1030) on Saturday February 17 2018, @01:57AM (#639163) Homepage

    Yes, the additional step of right clicking and clicking "Save image" or "Open image in new tab".

    Good golly, there are so many more valuable things to complain about, this is not one of them.

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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by ataradov on Saturday February 17 2018, @02:02AM (5 children)

    by ataradov (4776) on Saturday February 17 2018, @02:02AM (#639166) Homepage

    "View image" led to a full image, not the preview. Now you actually have to visit the site to get the full image. Possibly getting some bitcoin mining malware on the way.

    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 17 2018, @01:53PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 17 2018, @01:53PM (#639333)

      Actually it does lead to the full image. Always has. The only exception is images that are too large for goigle to proxy, which will retain a thumbnail on their server (you also get that thumbnail if you right click the image before it finishes loading from the source page fully and/or the source page is offline).

      • (Score: 1) by ataradov on Sunday February 18 2018, @06:45AM

        by ataradov (4776) on Sunday February 18 2018, @06:45AM (#639634) Homepage

        Presumably getty cares about those full res pictures, not some random small stuff. I assume small versions will remain as is.

    • (Score: 2) by darkfeline on Sunday February 18 2018, @03:58AM (2 children)

      by darkfeline (1030) on Sunday February 18 2018, @03:58AM (#639585) Homepage

      Would you care to provide an example? I tried five images searching for cake, and every single one opened the original image as hosted on the source website/domain.

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      • (Score: 1) by ataradov on Sunday February 18 2018, @06:42AM

        by ataradov (4776) on Sunday February 18 2018, @06:42AM (#639633) Homepage

        Yes, and this is not going to be the case anymore after the change takes effect.

      • (Score: 1) by ataradov on Sunday February 18 2018, @06:53AM

        by ataradov (4776) on Sunday February 18 2018, @06:53AM (#639636) Homepage

        Well, the button has disappeared. Use tools to select only large pictures. Now you see small preview only. And a few sites I tried, did not go to the actual page with a picture, but to some random dynamically generated page.

        It looks like it is time to investigate the GreaseMonkey script.

  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Grishnakh on Saturday February 17 2018, @02:04AM (1 child)

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Saturday February 17 2018, @02:04AM (#639167)

    On some sites, they use Javascript specifically to block you from right-clicking and saving the image. Disabling Javascript doesn't help because the site is dependent on it so you won't see the image at all without it. Luckily, there's extensions to get around this, like "Image Picka", but is extra hassle and most people don't know how to do this, or just give up.

    • (Score: 1) by DarkMorph on Sunday February 18 2018, @07:10PM

      by DarkMorph (674) on Sunday February 18 2018, @07:10PM (#639776)
      This reminds me of the JavaScript 1.4 and earlier days when some web devs were capturing the mouse event to intercept a right-click and claim that viewing source is not permitted. Nothing a quick Ctrl+U can't solve. This is much of the same. When are these twats going to grasp that anything you send to the client is already in their hands, and you can't keep them from taking it for themselves? In this instance, using Firefox as an example, you can use the page info's media widget to list all the embedded media on the page, including images, and pull them from there as separate files. Or hit the save command from the menu bar, and grab the whole page with its HTML and binary assets - chiefly, the images.

      A few weeks ago someone asked me about pulling fonts from any website. Oddly the media list in Firefox doesn't enumerate font payloads, but that doesn't stop the user from perusing through the CSS and snagging the binary assets nonetheless. And the hilarious part of this? The inquiring person was taking a font from a site trying to sell the fonts they've injected in full into your browser for viewing. If you don't want someone to have content from your site then don't send it to the fucking browser in the first place!!

      Tip for those trying to sell fonts they invent: try just posting images of what the text looks like rendered without actually using the font in the client visiting your page.
  • (Score: 2) by Marand on Sunday February 18 2018, @02:53AM

    by Marand (1081) on Sunday February 18 2018, @02:53AM (#639573) Journal

    Not a reliable alternative. I've noticed since the change that doing so with GIS is a craphsoot: sometimes you get the full-size image from the site, other times you get a tiny thumbnail that, presumably, they're serving specifically to Google to screw over people trying exactly that. The now-removed button was a lot more useful.

    I mostly use DDG for everything else already, but I still hung on to GIS because it did a good job most of the time. Now, though, it's annoying me enough that I'll probably quit using it, except as a fallback when (if) other engines fail to find what I'm looking for.