Google Image search is familiar to all of us. There are so many tools and option within Google’s image search which helps one to generate exact results he or she is looking for. In this article I'll be sharing some of the useful tips, tricks and techniques you will find helpful. There are many new options available and Google is surprising us often by adding unique features to their services. Let's discover the power of Google Image search... 

Recognizing a person or place from a picture

Google Image search has this new feature where you can paste a link or upload a picture and the search engine will tell you the details of the picture, if any, fetching from the web. This is very useful if you have to find out some persons in a photograph or so.
To do this go to www.images.google.com and at the left column of the text input box you'll see a small icon of a camera, click on this icon and paste the URL or upload the image itself from there. And the Google will do the rest.

Narrowing the search using the options in the left column

Once you search something with Google image search, in the results page's left side you'll see a column with many options. These options can narrow down your search to find the exact pictures you need. But that's not all; you can narrow your search even more once you go to the 'Advanced Search' option by clicking the small settings icon located at the top right corner of the page. Anyway, let's go through the quickly available options, which are directly available on the search results page, right now.

Time based filtering

The first option is the time range filtering. By default you can see the ‘Any time’ option will be selected. But say, if you need some latest photos of someone or some incident, then you can select ‘Past 24 hours’ or ‘Past week’ option. There is also option to display the photos published within a specific range of time.

Size based filtering

If you’re searching for photos for some presentation or something (Of course, there are copyright issues and I’ll be discussing about that later in this article) you’re going to need some high resolution pictures rather than small ones. So you can either select ‘Large’ or ‘Medium’ option to filter out all the small pictures. There are also options to search for exact resolution images by specifying the width and height you require in pixels. You can also search images which are larger than a fixed size.

Color based filtering

Next option is color based filtering which allows you to search for only images with Black and white color or even images which highlight a specific color.

Type based filtering

If you’re searching for someone and you need an image which gives preference to the person’s face, then you can select the face option from the list of options under ‘Type’. There are also other filtering options listed there such as ‘Clip Art’, ‘Line Drawing’ etc.

Using ‘Advanced Search’ option for image search

I have already said how to navigate to the ‘Advance Search’ of Google Image’s search. Now you can see many input boxes listed under the title ‘Find Images With....’. On the right side of these input boxes there are guidelines of how to do this search, directly, using shortcuts.

‘All these words’

Searching terms in this box returns results with all the words. For example, if we type in Computer mouse it returns images with tags computer and mouse.

‘This exact word or phrase’

If you’re searching for something exact (like a quote or saying) then enter it in this field as it returns results with exact words and order of words.

‘Any of these words’

If you use this box then it will return results with pages with any of the words you’ve mentioned. For e.g searching ‘Mountain River’ returns results which either includes mountain or river

‘None of these words’

This search option is very useful when you’re searching some terms which comes under two different subjects. For e.g. Virus is a term which is present in both in computer and biology related topics and to exclude the computer related virus in your search results you can type in ‘computer’ in this box.

Narrowing your search further

Under the options mentioned about you’ll see more options to narrow down your search results using more options. Most of these options are available directly on the results page and were discussed earlier above. Anyway, there are some more options under this page and they are discussed below.

Aspect ratio

This allows you to search images of specific aspect ratio. For e.g. if you want panoramic images then set the aspect ratio as panoramic and you’ll be shown only such images.

Region

This option lets you search for images based on specific regions. For e.g. searching for ‘Temples’ can be narrowed by selecting a country.

Site or Domain

Let’s you search images in a specific site or domain. For e.g. you can filter for images only from government site by typing .gov in here.

Safe Search

Want to display only family friendly results? Then set your safe search option to strict. If not set it to moderate (which excludes most of the explicit images) or Off to allow all kinds of images.

File type

Using this you can select the image format like Jpg, BMP etc. This is useful sometimes while you’re searching for .gif images or transparent formats like.png.

Filtering based on license

All the images have some sort of licensing and one cannot simply search images from the web and use for their projects. There are many copyright laws existing and when downloading images one should be careful. In some cases one can use images with ‘Fair use’ policy. So it may not be a serious problem if one use an image of a monument in a Slide show presentation in his class room (yet, it is safer and better to ask for the permission of the publisher of the image).

So one should not be adding images to a website, blog, articles etc. which he/she obtained from a simple Google Image search. Anyway, Google Image search has an option which filters out images by license. And it’s discussed below.

As you can see from the screenshot above there are number of option available under the license based filtering. By default Google searches for images which are not filtered by license. Anyway, there are many other options like ‘Free to use or share’ etc. which gives you images which are a little more liberal to use for our needs. One should keep in mind that such images are also licensed and there may be many conditions to use such images, like adding a link to the original website of the image owner in the page you’ve added the image.

These are some of the important things one should know about Google’s Image search. It’s very powerful and can be used efficiently using the various features available.