New Greasemonkey Lightbox Script

Buyers, there’s a new Greasemonkey script in town, and this one is right up your alley when it comes to ease of use of iStockphoto’s lightbox functionality.

Don’t Forget the “Seasonal Search”

Sometimes the iStockphoto search can seem a little bit daunting.  However, with the holiday season coming up, have no fear.  There are a set of pre-made searches that you can utilize to speed up your search tasks, or even just to brainstorm with.  The Seasonal Search page.

New iStockphoto Search Filter

I’m not sure how long this has been there, but I just learned of it today, so I’m passing it on to you.  When you do a search for content on iStockphoto, in the left column are a bunch of attributes and filters you can use to modify the return results.  Well, way at the bottom, under “More Attributes” is the new (?) “Files From” filter:

iStock Best Match Slider Comes and Goes

Recently, I discussed the iStockphoto Best Match sort and how adjusting this slider was supposed to make the sort return more or less “relevant” to what you were searching for.  ie., you could have it less relevant and more “brainstorm”-ish while still on the keyword, or you could get really targeted results for a (set of) keyword(s).  Well, the plan is for the slider to bid “Bon Voyage”.  Not quite yet though.

Best Match Slider Wonkiness

iStockphoto offers a variety of sorting methods to work with your search return.  You can choose to sort by downloads (greatest to lowest), age (newest to oldest), contributor name, etc.  All these can be found under the “sort by” pull down at the top of the search results page.  Of course, there is the favorite “Best Match” sort, which should offer up a reasonable variety based on things like view popularity, downloads, age, etc.  It is a secret algorithm, but occasionally, you can notice big changes to the parameters that make it up.

iStock Search Updates

A new software release went out yesterday on iStockphoto.com.  Unfortunately, while some favorite functionality has returned, some new buggy-ness has surfaced.

Good news for everyone who has been clamoring for the “Color Search” and “Copyspace Finder” tools that disappeared late last year.  They have now returned, to be found amidst all the search options in the left column.  They both seem to be working – the color search giving back a very targeted set of results based on your choice, and the copyspace finder helping to find areas of “blank-ish” information within images.  The choices appear in the “bread box” at the top, and are easily removed.

There have been some changes to keyworded search return results, and this is where the problems are arising.  In the recent past, they’ve been trying to be smart with the search, so if you were to enter “New York City winter”, the search would break it up into strange combinations, trying to isolate the useful phrase, “New York City” unsuccessfully, giving a list in the bread box like:

• New York
• City
• Winter
• New
• York

So, it was essentially a mess.   Now, it seems to want to just find the important phrase and split it out, but in the case above, there is actually a phrase in the controlled vocabulary added by a user that is “New York City winter”.  So the search finds that, assumes it is an exact match and returns just one file.  So the searcher needs to do:

“New York City” and winter

… which of course is not intuitive at all.  So for the unforseeable future, use the word “AND” between searches.  Even something as silly as “sexy businesswoman” returns zero results, while “sexy AND businesswoman” gives the right return.

And that’s the news for today.

An Apostrophe Will Now Work

Last week, I blogged about the problems in the iStockphoto search engine with apostrophes not working correctly.  It appears this bug has been fixed, so apostrophize away!

Apostrophe’s (sic)

My biggest pet peeve is people who cannot use apostrophes correctly.  Like “Rug’s on sale” or “Try our new fry’s”.  Anything like that.  So, imagine my mental battle in suggesting you do not use an apostrophe in an appropriate place for a while.  Like when searching for stock photos.

iStockphoto Color Search

With the recent revamp of the iStockphoto search interface, several things went temporarily missing, one of which was the ability to color search.  If you don’t recall how this worked, you can read my blog post on the subject from back in 2008 here.  Essentially, it allowed the buyer to narrow their search towards a specific color.  Every uploaded image is assigned a “color” when accepted, and the search works based on that.  Probably some sort of weighted average of the pixel colors or something.  Anyway, if you miss the ability to color search, until it reappears (hopefully soon), you can use Google image search to do an end run.

iStockphoto To Improve Search Interface

Yesterday, iStockphoto announced upcoming changes to the search interface for finding content.  Essentially, most of the functionality found in the “advanced search” box, as well as a sort of breadcrumb history of what filtering you have done so far, will be easily found in the left hand search column.  There is an article detailing the changes here.  The forum thread about the release is here.