FINDING PHOTOS ONLINE

 By Julian Sher

You need a photo of the ebola virus to show to an interview subject for an article you are doing for tomorrow's paper. For a TV piece on tourism, you need a picture of the Italian lira. Or your child is doing some homework and needs a picture of Confucius for a history paper. Where to look?

Of course, by putting in the keywords in any decent search engine, you can hope the page you find comes with illustrations. You can also put in words like "picture" next to your search term, but that assumes the web page has used those words on their site.

Also, any results you get will just list the web pages. You'll have to click on each one to see if there is a photo.

You're much better off using specialized visual search engines, all found on my site at www.journalismnet.com/video.

Still Photos

For news photos, there are several sites that specialize in quick access to pictures of hot stories or people.

Yahoo news Photos offers the widest selection at http://dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/g/ts/. It also has the best Advanced Search box at http://search.news.yahoo.com/search/news_photos/options which allows you to narrow your search by date.

Excite (at www.excite.com/photo ) allows you to search by keyword but also by country and topic - although the pickings can be slim for some categories. The country search is at www.excite.com/photo/location/

Headline Spot also has a good list of photo sites from various American newspapers and agencies at www.headlinespot.com/type/photos/

Most of these photos are copyrighted; if your news organization does not have an arrangement with the producers, you cannot use them for broadcast or publication without paying for them.

If you're looking for a photo that is not directly tied to a news event, several special search tools can do the work for you - and most of their images are in the public domain.

Diggit (www.diggit.com) is probably the best, with an easy search function and a good database.

Ditto (www.ditto.com) is also decent.

You'll find many other tools at www.journalismnet.com/video/stills.htm.

Network archives

For one-stop shopping at several of world's major broadcasters, you can't beat FootageNet at www.footagenet.com . Click on Global Database, put in a keyword (be sure to select "all words" if you have more than one keyword) and you will get hundreds of results. No images, though. You select thedatabase you want - say, ABC or Movietone - and then pull up detailed shotlists and descriptions. You can then order the tapes you want.

For an instant peak at today's or recent news videos, check out TVNewsWeb at http://www.tvnewsweb.com/index.shtml. If your company buys their software and machines, you can instantly download broadcast-quality video through the web as well.

If you already know which network is likely to have the visuals you want, you can access their sites directly at www.journalismnet.com/visuals/ . CNN has a vast archive at www.cnnimagesource.com. APTN --- formed by a merger of AP with WTN - has one of the most extensive international libraries going back to 1963 (at www.aptnlibrary.com)

(CTV and CBC do not offer any online services. Canadian Press offers a pay-for service at http://cparchive.cp.org.)

Specialty searches are also available - for example, for science visuals at http://www.eurekalert.org/resources/visuals.html.

Visual search engines

If video is what you want but it doesn't have to have a news edge, most of the major search engines also provide tools for video searches

AltaVista has a dedicated visual search engine at www.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?mmdo=1&stype=simage which allows to indicate if you want colour stills, black and white photos, or graphics
Lycos at

Excite (at www.excite.com/search/photosearch) gives good results. Lycos has one of the more sophisticated search boxes at http://multimedia.lycos.com/ where you can play the videos right away.

Virage.com offers a peak at the future - a way to scan visual archives by doing a keyword search. You can use the system already at the CNN web archive of the Microsoft trial at www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/video/gates/

It's the future. Eventually, searching for video and pictures will be as easy as word searches. For now, use all the special tools listed above and you'll save a lot of time.

                        
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Julian Sher, the creator and webmaster of Journalism Net (www.journalismnet.com), does Internet training in newsrooms around the world. He can be reached by email at jsher@journalismnet.com. This article and many other columns from "Media" magazine are available online with hot links on the JournalismNet Tips page at www.journalismnet.com/tips
                                                                    

        
©2001 Julian Sher.  Reprint only if full credit is given.