Google Image Search And Professional Photo Researchers

Earlier I  wrote about "Those who attended New Orleans [the PACA meeting on November 2003] will remember the fireworks sparked when one art director said she prefers using GOOGLE" to search for images and "to going to an agency, and then calling photographers directly."

At the recently held CEPIC in Prague Dagmar Fabricius of StockPhotoFinder explained that this incident had been one of the bottom ideas to found the company.

Now Christina Micek writes about "The Advent of Google Image Search and its Affect on Photo Researchers" at MacTribe:

Most people in the imaging world today are aware of an alternative to the ever-popular Google search engine: the Google Image Search. [...]
I have seen people in my field using this tool for a variety of functions [...]

For the professional photo researcher like myself, Google's new and popular image searching capabilities are both a hindrance and an asset when it comes to fulfilling my client's requests. [...]

Are we getting excited yet? One thing that needs to be addressed, if this is going to be the wave of the future for photography, is to put those who need content in touch with those that have content. We need to rethink and reevaluate the way in which images are used on the web. Photographers who have websites need to be aware of metatags, captions, keywords and how they are used with this new tool to maximize appropriate hits.

Nathan Tyler, Google's technology public relations contact, recommends that if photographers are interested in having their images represented in Google Image Search they should evaluate their own websites to make sure there are clear sitemaps that link to every page. They should be easily crawled by search engines and not be behind forms such as ID and PW requests. Frames and dynamically generated pages are also problematic. For more information on this please refer to www.google.com/intl/en/webmasters. I would recommend niche photographers who have specific collections that may not interest more generalized stock photography agencies, increase their sales by working within these constraints. [...]

I love using Google Image Search in my research, and I am often fascinated at where the journey can take me, from speaking to a small group of architectural researchers in Guatemala, to entomologists studying Daddy Long Legs in Great Britain. However, for my ease in licensing these rare and specific images, and for the ease of image creators in getting their best stuff to researchers and buyers, we should all be working together to make the possibilities opened up by the Google Image Search technology to work for us all.

Christina also points out that "when I get stuck finding a source, I often turn to another one of my favorite new search methods, Google Scholar (scholar.google.com), a search engine of scholarly journals. It can show me specific academic articles and sources on a wide range of subject matter from social interactions in Gibbons to fetal brain tissue implants to treat Parkinson's patients."

Comments

[Norma Jean Gargasz]

I am looking for photo researchers and rights to photos buyers for stock photography. Respond to:njgargasz@gargaszphotos.com