New Google image search

Google’s rolled out a new way to display image search results — and a lot of people don’t like it, especially as up to 1000 image thumbnails display per page now and all the old information like where the image was from, its dimensions and its file size are now only available by hovering over the image and seeing the details in a pop-up window.

You can reset your image results display back to the old view by scrolling to the bottom of the search results, then clicking Switch to basic version. However, as at the date of writing this post (25 July 2010), this setting only holds for the current session and doesn’t ‘stick’.

I can imagine an awful lot of people still on dial-up or slow links or limited download plans (and yes, that’s a LOT of the world, Google!) will NOT be happy with this change as the amount of data transferred to display 1000 images could well blow out their slow connections or download limits.

#fail Google. At least allow users to set the type of display they want in their search Preferences… and don’t assume that Google users throughout the world have high-speed, always-on, unlimited download access like many in the US do. We don’t.

(By the way, I don’t see the new search results display yet in Firefox or IE — but my husband has been getting them for a day or so. We’re on the same static IP address, so I have no idea why he sees them and I don’t as there’s nothing different in our settings.)

Looking for a royalty-free photo?

Then head on over to this list of some 40 sources of royalty-free stock images: http://www.instantshift.com/2009/03/03/40-sources-to-download-high-quality-royalty-free-stock-images/

I was familiar with a couple of them (MorgueFile and Flickr’s Creative Commons photos), but most were new to me.

Also, take a look at PhotoXpress: http://photoxpress.com/

[Link last checked March 2010; thanks to @dmnguys who Tweeted these sites a few weeks ago]

Word: Pictures in a table of contents

Recently a few people have asked me to fix their auto-generated table of contents (TOC) in Word. Somehow they’ve ended up with a picture in there and they don’t know how or why, and it keeps coming back when they regenerate the TOC.

This one’s easy to fix—once you know why it occurs.

The default behavior of Word is to use Heading styles to create the TOC and the Caption style to create lists of figures and tables. The paragraph the picture is in has a Heading or Caption style applied to it.

1. Find the picture in the body of the document.
2. Replace the Heading or Caption style with a standard paragraph style (alternatively, select Clear Formatting from the styles list).
3. Regenerate the TOC/list of figures/list of tables and the picture should be gone forever!

[This article was first published in the March 2005 CyberText Newsletter]