Searching Images by Usage Rights

The Bing Image search team has been hard at work. Today, we are excited to offer the “Search by License” feature for Bing image search. At Bing, we love helping creative artists whether you’re a blogger, teacher, student or even a small business owner looking to market your latest creation. We understand how frustrating it can be to when you come up with just the right blog post or the perfect poster for your class project, only to realize you don’t have the appropriate rights to use them the way you intended to. Searching for photos online should be a simple and pleasant experience leaving you with just as many hair follicles as you started with!

And so today we invite you to try out the new license filter on Bing Images. Whether you are a blogger who loves to write, a teacher helping students with a project or a publisher looking to create commercial flyers, we have made it easier and faster for you to fetch licensed pictures for your work. Previously, you had to find photos and then individually cycle through the details of each photo to verify if there is any license information. Now, Bing has simplified this process to allow you to filter by usage rights and only see images that have a Creative Commons license.

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For example, if you run a birthday cake blog that is supported by advertisements and are looking for designs of kids’ birthday cakes to put on your blog, you can narrow down your search results to only those photos that you can use commercially.

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See a picture that fancies your taste? One click, and there you have it.

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Want only those pictures that you can modify for style consistency? Just go back and filter results by another option that lets you modify images and still use them commercially – all within a couple of clicks. If you are not sure which option to use, you can always click the last option to learn more. Before using an image, we highly recommend familiarizing yourself with the details of the Creative Commons license so as to understand what is allowed and what is restricted. You can find the license by going to the source of the image, looking up the exact license and then reading its details on the Creative Commons website.

In the latest version of Office 2013, you can also search for images on Bing directly from any Office application. Not only that, the search results will show licensed images by default. This is also based on the same technology that is powering the “Search by License” filter we are introducing today.

Give it a try and tell us what you think.

— Rizwan Ansary, Program Manager, Bing Images