I'd recently noticed this change. It does make it harder for people to steal images, as the Verge article put right in the headline. Given that there are so few websites that encourage the use of pictures—Commons, Pixabay, etc.—on net it's probably a good thing. Even on Commons people should check out the licensing info and make sure a picture has the license they need/expect. So many people assume everything on the internet is public domain https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/public_domain(1) just because it is in the public domain(3).
On the other hand, some sites are so bad about making it hard to find images on a page—huge Pinterest collections are like that—that "view image" was the only practical way to see a higher resolution version of an image.
Still, I think having to go to Commons and see the context of the image is good for helping people understand copyright and to learn about more permissive licenses.
Trey Jones Sr. Software Engineer, Search Platform Wikimedia Foundation
On Fri, Feb 23, 2018 at 11:58 AM, Chris Koerner ckoerner@wikimedia.org wrote:
Preemptive apology for the cross-post
I haven't seen this noted anywhere in our community and thought it was worthy of discussion.
Google has removed an easily accessible button that would take you directly to the image file in search results. I wonder what impact this may have, if any, on the discovery and use of images hosted on Wikimedia projects (most notably Commons) that appear in these Google search results.
https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/964226180776845312
See also: https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/15/17017864/google-removes- view-image-button-from-search-results
Hat tip to Quim Gil for sharing.
Yours, Chris Koerner Community Liaison Wikimedia Foundation
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