Searching for Images

Finding Images Online

As an Art teacher I often need to put together a presentation about famous artist.  One of the beast tools I use for finding images for my presentations is Google Images with Search Tools.  This tool is also great for finding historical images as well.

Once you are in the Google Image search engine select the search tools.   Here you can set more parameters including size, type of image (i.e. face, landscape, line drawing, etc), color, and labeled for reuse. Because many of us are concerned about copyright issues and this tool can be a great tool.  The only problem is that the “labeled for reuse” is not a default setting, so most image are not labeled as such. This can make the results very limited and not very reliable.  

Notes about copyright: Any image that is over 70 years old is fair use.  A photo of a painting belongs to the photographer, not the painter.  Also any website that are overly concerned with copyright will have their images locked or watermarked.  

Image Searches for Students

Here are some results for "Starry Night"  I think the Bat-signal is my favorite 

But what about when you want students to search for art images?  There are couple of solutions for this.  The first and easiest is to just switch on the SafeSearch filter on Google image search.  This is fine for filtering out explicit images, but only if those image are labeled as such.  Also, one problem that I have had, is that search results can yield unexpected results. 

 One way to make sure that your students find the real art by the real artist is to create a custom search.   With a custom search you can make sure that your students are only searching reliable websites. Another great feature is that you can embed this search engine into an existing site or use it as a stand along website. Here is the address to my custom search https://www.google.com:443/cse/publicurl?cx=001331390169538740020:x3vjvyhkf8c  I have also embedded my custom search at the top of this post and on the sidebar of this blog.   My custom search will only search through wikiart.org, artnet.org, artcyclopedia.com, and Google Art Project.  This way when my students are looking up painting by Vincent Van Gogh they will find accual images produced by the famous artist Vincent Van Gogh and they won't find a 4th grade project of Starry Night posted on pintrest.   To learn how to make your own custom search click here.