You’ve most likely searched for images on Google by using keywords, but have you ever searched for images using images? It would be a pretty cool idea wouldn’t it? This is exactly what Google allows you to do now. And it is just as easy to do as normal searching.
You can get started by going over to http://www.google.com/images, or if you’re on the main Google website, you can just click on the “Images” link at the top left corner. You’ll know you’re on the right page when you see the small ‘camera’ icon next to the search box.
Upon clicking the camera icon, you have one of two choices: either paste in the URL of the image or upload an image from your computer (dragging an image from your computer into the search box works as well). Afterwards, Google will search for images that are similar to the one you just put in. In many cases, you will get results of the same image in different dimensions, as well as images that have similar styles, colors, etc. This method is very effective if you want to find an image with a different resolution (i.e. to use as a wallpaper, icon on a website, etc.).
There are many other useful ways to use this type of search. Here is one good example: suppose you are listening to music on YouTube and you come to a video that has a picture that you think will look awesome as a wallpaper (such as this one). But there is no link in the description to the picture. One way of going about this is to execute the image search in Google you just learned. However, you cannot input the URL because it links to a page with the video, and not an actual image; and on the other hand, you don’t have an image on your computer that you could use. But thinking back to what you learned in IT101, you do have the Snipping Tool.
If you forgot how to access the Snipping Tool, just click on the Windows button at the bottom left corner of your computer and type in “Snipping Tool”. Afterwards, you can snip out a portion of the Youtube page, as can be seen in the image to the right. After doing an image search on Google with this image and a little bit of browsing, you come across this page, which seems to be the origin of this picture. Now you not only have access to a high resolution 1920×1200 version of the image, but you can use the various image scaling websites on the internet to size it down to a resolution that matches your computer.
Hope you learned something new and found a resourceful way to use the tools on your computer with the internet. Enjoy the song and Happy Valentines Day!
