Microsoft's Age-Old Image Library 'Clip Art' Is No More 110
hypnosec writes Microsoft has finally bid a goodbye to the age-old Clip Art image library found in its Office products as its usage has been declining over the years. Redmond replaced the Clip Art's online image library with Bing Image Search. This means that people searching for online images inside an Office app will now be directed to a gallery powered by Bing Images that will bring in results from around the web. Bing's copyright filter based on the Creative Commons licensing system will let users get royalty-free images which they can use, share, or modify for either personal or commercial use.
Re: (Score:3)
For reasons that escape me, my kids' teachers use clip art on everything. You get a flyer with 5 words on it and twice as many clip-art renderings of school buses and apples.
Re: (Score:3)
It's because kids don't need good graphic design.
Re:Good riddance (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good riddance (Score:4, Funny)
I'll open the ".DOC" file that they send via email and see :)
Re: Good riddance (Score:2)
Or the email with the link to the page containing a list of URLs pointing at PDF files. Because it's easier to do all that than to read whatever is in the PDF file on a web page somewhere.
Re: Good riddance (Score:4, Insightful)
We should make an email viewer that de-moronifies school emails. In all fairness to the teachers, the content delivery systems that they are stuck with are also very painful.
Re: (Score:1)
Joke's on them; I don't have Comic Sans installed.
Re: (Score:1)
Joke's on you, the font is embedded into the document.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
At work we'll get emails with attached powerpoint slide(~4MB) with around two lines of text for this or that event. They don't bother to put any information about the event in the body of the email so we don't have to fire up powerpoint to figure out what they're advertising.
Re: (Score:2)
I'll open the ".DOC" file that they send via email and see :)
If you're lucky. If you're not, it's a ".PPT" file.
Re: Good riddance (Score:1)
Even worse IMO is that comic sans font my boss always puts on her PowerPoints. No easier way to look immature and idiotic than to use that.
Comic Neue (Score:2)
Even worse IMO is that comic sans font my boss always puts on her PowerPoints
Would any of these be better?
Re:Good riddance (Score:5, Funny)
"Clip art being replaced with Bing Images"
At first I like: YAY!
And then I was like: DOH!
Re: Good riddance (Score:1)
You can actually choose to insert your own from your computer or use another search provider I think. I subscribe to Office 365 for Business and have used the clip art search exactly once, switching to using Google via Chrome after a few minutes of a fruitless search of the Bing results (plenty of good results, just didn't find what I wanted).
Re: (Score:2)
If I do a web image search, I get 2,000,000,000,000,000 possible matches to wade through. With maybe 0.0001% of them being simplified line art or, heaven forfend, SVG.
Also, that random pile of images has no cohesive style.
wow, me break
Re: (Score:1)
Have you ever looked at Microsoft Office's clip-art? It also has no cohesive style, and is full of awkward goofy styles and oddly specific pictures that you can't imagine being appropriate for any document other than "how not to use clip-art".
Re: (Score:2)
Why, other than anti-Microsoft bias? If Google doesn't also have this creative commons filter, Bing has become the superior product for clip art searches.
Re:Good riddance (Score:5, Informative)
If Google doesn't also have this creative commons filter, Bing has become the superior product for clip art searches.
It does.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
> you're better off googling for it (not binging).
Why, other than anti-Microsoft bias? If Google doesn't also have this creative commons filter, Bing has become the superior product for clip art searches.
Why? Because I've found Google to provide better search results than Bing. That's why. Do you believe that the only reason people use Google instead of Bing is that they have an anti-Microsoft bias?
Re: (Score:2)
As someone with a very public anti-MS stance, I'll admit that I've had good results come back with Bing. If a GIS doesn't bring back what I'm looking for, Bing will. It's just their general web search that I can't get used to.
Also, Bing's video search is far ahead of Google's
Another feature replaced with tracking (Score:4, Insightful)
Another feature that was previously offline that has now been replaced with an online only feature that will track you.
I have nothing inherently against online features but the fact that they /always/ go hand in hand with tracking causes me to be against.
Re: (Score:1)
The summary seems to imply that they were already tracking users and their usage of the clip art library.
More and more it seems like just keeping Office XP or 2010 around is the best bet. How much you hate the ribbon would determine which one you keep, I guess.
Re: (Score:1)
At least with Office XP you don't have deal with the huge flaw in Word where it insists on displaying two pages side by side on the screen rather than one page at a time.
Not being able to see one page without shifting around screen resolution and zoom levels is inexcusable, yet Microsoft apparently feels usability is far down the list of things it needs to worry about.
Sort of like large portions of FOSS software.
Re: (Score:2)
What huge flaw? "View -> One Page". Done. No side-by-side page layouts.
Re: (Score:3)
No, it doesn't work because then the page is set to the left of the screen.
What I and thousands of others want is for a single page, centered on the screen, just the way it used to be before Office 2010 came out.
Without fiddling with your zoom level or screen resolution, this cannot (currently) be done.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Stays in the centre for me, regardless of the zoom - Office 2013 here.
Split down the middle (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Another feature replaced with tracking (Score:1)
Heres a flaw: create a .doc in 2003 highlight some text and save it. Open it in 2010 and try to remove that highlighting.
Re: (Score:1)
Heaven forbid they improve features by letting you easily insert more images in to documents
Remove != Improve (Score:2, Interesting)
You could already insert images into documents, so your statement is a fabrication. This removes an internal set of images which allowed you to insert images without an internet connection. This is not an improvement as you claim, because this simply removes a feature and does not add anything.
The library has been hidden from users for a while, so it's not a shock that people don't use it as often today. Having the product depend on their search engine seems like another anti-trust case waiting to happen
Re:Remove != Improve (Score:5, Interesting)
MS Clipart wasn't internal, or stored on your local PC since Microsoft Office 2003. It's gone online to download the clipart. In 2003 -> 2010 it cached them locally so that if you downloaded it once, it was cached on your computer so you could re-use it without having to download it again.
What was nice about the Clipart was they were all vector-based images. Meaning they scaled nicely. All the images that come up using the Bing search are 300x400 or close -- which looks like crap if you try to use it. Sure, most of the images in the clipart library were pretty bad and way overused, but at least they were pixelated crap.
Re:Remove != Improve (Score:4, Insightful)
exactly. I don't know why the responses here are so positive. Getting rid of a primarily vector based library that takes up little space and is available locally is not a great move at all. If you don't like it, fine don't use it. But your points are well taken - this move to online everything is tedious, slow, and frustrating. I need my documents in a cloud, but I sure don't need my bloody word processor in the cloud.
Think Global, install Local.
Re: (Score:2)
That could quite likely be the last time I was tempted to use clipart in a document.
Probably around then, I snaffled a copy of an open clipart library. But I don't think I've needed to use it since. Try https://openclipart.org/downlo... [openclipart.org] for a DVD or two.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Another feature replaced with tracking (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm concerned about the Bing filter not working (or people maliciously manipulating their pages into being displayed as CC when Bing searches it) and then being sued. With the current clipart library, I knew it came with a licencse to be used.
Laptops are still islands (Score:2)
PCs aren't islands anymore
They are when they're laptops on a bus, train, or airplane, and your employer is unwilling to foot the bill for mobile Internet.
Re: (Score:1)
Put on your tinfoil hat and post A/C!!
Re: (Score:1)
No longer OOXML ISO compliant then? (Score:3, Informative)
Re: No longer OOXML ISO compliant then? (Score:1)
I think standards and APIs are popular/important only while you're trying to achieve dominance, but afterwards you can stop all that. Google (reader) and Netflix can tell you all about that.
Coming Soon! (Score:3, Funny)
Microsoft ClipArt365, a subscription-based online product where you can the entirety of MS's ClipArt library anywhere in the world*. Never worry about not having the right piece of ClipArt at your fingertips; just use our quick ClipSearch** feature and you'll have the right art at your fingerprints in moments! Then simply insert the art into your Word(tm) document, Excel(tm) spreadsheet or Powerpoint(tm) presentation with a single-click!***. All this for $12/mo or $120/year!
* Internet connection required.
** Internet Explorer 12.1 or higher required
*** Requires Office365 or higher. Art cannot be inserted into other documents. Internet connection required to view document with clipart.
Re: (Score:1)
Microsoft ClipArt365, a subscription-based online product where you can the entirety of MS's ClipArt library anywhere in the world*. Never worry about not having the right piece of ClipArt at your fingertips; just use our quick ClipSearch** feature and you'll have the right art at your fingerprints in moments! Then simply insert the art into your Word(tm) document, Excel(tm) spreadsheet or Powerpoint(tm) presentation with a single-click!***. All this for $12/mo or $120/year!
Not sure I'd have even modded that funny. Right now, MS might be perfectly happy to play fast and loose with other peoples copyright, but it won't be long before they see a potential revenue stream and buy up someone like iStock.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
* Internet connection required.
** Internet Explorer 12.1 or higher required
*** Requires Office365 or higher. Art cannot be inserted into other documents. Internet connection required to view document with clipart.
I think you forgot:
**** Service not guaranteed to be available 365 days a year.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
Log in next time Mr. Balmer.
Re:Coming Soon! (Score:5, Funny)
If the chair fits, throw it.
Copyright filter? (Score:2)
How does that filter works? Do images have internal metadata about licensing? Or is "copyright filter" just another way of saying that searches will only occur on websites hosting Creative Commons photos and images?
Re: (Score:2)
I'm guessing it'll have a filter for a meta "Licenc(/s)e" field. Not all images will have this meta field, they'll be hidden from search results. Instant hit for those companies that have a deal with MS to fix the filters so their images are at the top of the return listings every time...
Re: (Score:2)
Creative Commons allows the author to specify if attribution is required. It is requested (optional) in the default CC license.
Re: (Score:2)
What if Microsoft's programs simply watermark the images with the required attribution? That would require yet more metadata, but IMHO all of this should already exists.
Re: (Score:2)
Based on this page [microsoft.com], I would say that it doesn't work at all:
When you find an image that you want, go to the originating website for the image and determine the actual license for the image.
Re: (Score:2)
That's not a filter at all!
Microsoft could try partnerships with at least a dozen photo hosting services to set a meta-data standard for all the licensing information required to be embedded into the JPEG and PNG files themselves. It would also be a good time to ask Apple and Google to join in the effort to establish such a standard.
Re: (Score:2)
What if you can spell museum but can't spell "never mind"? ;)
Re: (Score:2)
bing and wmf (Score:1)
ext:svg (Score:2)
How the hell will bing fibd vector graphics which clipart was
ext:svg [bing.com], I presume.
Re: (Score:2)
And any company with a brain in theirl legal department will add an additional filter to filter out those. At least the advantage of the CC licences is that they are machine readable. (ok. "readable" is a bit misleading. Can be represented by a combination of machine readable flags)
But still, with the old clipart, you knew that the images belonged to the Offce package and you were fine to include them into documents generated with that office package. (same for Corel Draw. No one bought that for the actual
Who??? (Score:1)
STUPID (Score:3)
For all the reasons outline here, [slashdot.org] unless MS is going to embed their own metadata into every image I use that promises the image is safe, and that if it isn't, MS will foot the bill. Even so, that won't help me if I print something and lose the original digital version with the metadata. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Re: (Score:3)
You can still get the classic Office experience back.
Click the up arrow in the right hand side of Ribbon, and it is hidden. Now go to the Quick Access toolbar at the left hand side of the titlebar and from its dropdown menu, choose "Show Below the Ribbon". Now you can add any commands that you want into this toolbar and it essentially gives you the same functionality that you had in previous versions of Word.
Have a nice day.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
No, I'm complaining about the ribbon, too, even though I've gotten used to it.
This is great news (Score:1)
for repair technicians. Most of the virus cleanings I do come from people searching for images!
EU (Score:2)
How long until the EU breaks up this blatant attempt at bundling?
Copyright nightmare (Score:2)
Bing's copyright filter based on the Creative Commons licensing system will let users get royalty-free images which they can use, share, or modify for either personal or commercial use.
Sorry... you can't safely vet for copyright using an automated tool.
What happens when someone mistakenly (or maliciously?) mislabels a copyright-protected work managed by a rights troll as CC0 or CCBY ?