Welcome to the third in this series on searching for images the legal way. If you missed them, check out part one (using Google image search and Microsoft to find legal images), and part two (safe picture search engines).

Today we’re meeting (possibly) the best colour search engine in the world, also known as the Multicolr Search Engine from TinEye Labs. Use it to search for pictures by colour. This is a fantastic tool, especially if you’re trying to build a colour scheme for a visual piece of work. All the images have a creative commons licence, which means they are going to be fine to reuse in your academic and professional work. read more

When you’re looking for pictures to illustrate or enhance your academic work, how do you search? Do you ‘copy and paste’ from the internet, as a student recently told me? Or simply type your search term in that old reliable, Google?

Unless you’re careful, searching like this can contravene copyright law and potentially get you into legal trouble. Whenever you find an image through a regular Google search, there’s a good chance that it either:

• has a license which forbids you to use it, or
• has no license at all

Assuming that you didn’t ask for prior permission to use the content, it’s illegal to use it if either of these two cases applies. read more