Ask HN: What do I use in place of Microsoft Clip Art now that it is dead?

84 points

11 years ago

Microsoft Clip Art Gallery was completely closed back in December (http://gizmodo.com/microsoft-is-killing-clip-art-because-nobody-uses-it-an-1665634402) and replaced by Bing Images. As a teacher, this is turning out to be a huge problem when trying to make worksheets. The old clip art gallery was immensely useful because:

  1. Filtering by image type worked perfectly.
  2. I knew there would be no license issues.
  3. Although content may not have been perfect, the quality was uniform and good enough for handouts.
  4. I wouldn't run into NSFW images (I have seen NSFW images even with strict search on before).
  5. No watermarks.
  6. Predictable uniform dimensions.

I understand that for the majority of people the Clip Art Gallery was useless. But for us educators, it was invaluable. Can anyone suggest an alternative with similar quality & functionality to the old Clip Art Search?

Granted that it's legal, I'm even willing to replicate the old Clip Art Search site & host it if an archive of all the clip art images is available for download.

In case anyone is curious, here are the main problems with generic image search engines (Bing, Google):

  - Strict search is not full proof. With Google, turning it on breaks half of YouTube as well (blocks an insane amount of content so good luck looking for music/videos to use in the classroom without resorting to downloading it).
  - It's annoying to find clip art because most of the clip art on the web is watermarked.
  - Licensing (Bing is support to have an option for this but I don't see it when I use Bing Images!)
  - It's also annoying to have to deal with images of varying dimensions and quality (takes longer to adjust sizes in docs). Picking Square on Bing Images doesn't actually give you 1:1 ratio images.

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