Google removes ‘View Image’ button from its image search result page

Google said,”The Search by Image button is also being removed”. Well it turns out that the “View Image’ button had to be removed as part of a legal settlement between the search giant and Getty Images”.

Professional photographers and publishers have always been complaining that Google has made it easy for people to steal their photos. This is a step Google is taking to help protect photographers’ copyrights. There are tons of public domain and creative commons images out there (like everything on Wikipedia, for instance), and lots of organizations are free to use many copyrighted images under fair use.

On Thursday, Google announced that it plans to remove the “View Image” button from its image search results interface. The “View Image” extension should now be installed which can be verified by looking at the new icon in the Chrome taskbar. However, this will have a strong impact on users since the View button gave an easy access to see the image itself without going to the original site. But you can always do the reverse image search in this case and you can see the related images. The image will open in another tab from where you can save.

Google’s intention behind the move seems to be two – either stop people from stealing pictures or drive them to the source website of the image, so that atleast the website can serve ads and get revenue. Per the agreement, Google will obtain a multi-year license to use Getty photos in its products, but also agreed to change on how images were handled on image search.

“We will work closely with Google to improve attribution of our contributors’ work and grow the ecosystem”, the photo agency said.

Quite rightly, most people are blaming Getty for the changes.

“This is a ridiculous inconvenience”, writes Jesse Levesque. They just make image search less useful than it was.

People online are upset over a new decision from Google that makes it a little harder to download photos. “In fact Bing Image is superior”.

Critics also suggested turning to a variety of image-search alternatives, including Duck Duck Go, Bing, and Yahoo. Don’t like it? There’a already a petition you can sign.