Finding images to use on a website, blog or social network account is easy, but figuring out the license rights for those photos is much harder. Today, Microsoft announced a new feature that"s been added to its Bing search page that should help people who want to stay legal in the use of online photos.
The official Bing blog has the details on the image license filter feature. Basically, when you search for a photo on Bing, it brings up if you want to break the search results by certain rights categories, such as if a photo is completely in the public domain or if they require that they are display with certain restrictions. The blog states:
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.
The new filter also offers a way to find photos that allow for the images to be modified, again with certain restrictions. Microsoft says that the current version of Office 2013 also uses the same technology, allowing owners to search for images inside any of its applications and show only licensed images by default.
Source: Microsoft | Image via Microsoft