Google search removed “view image” button so that pictures will be harder to steal

The search engine giant, Google, removed their “view image” feature so that pictures will be much harder to steal. This is a great news for websites and photographers but worse for users. This button was very useful and helpful to users. That’s because, when you’re searching for pictures, there’s a big chance that you want to take it and use for something. But now, you will have to go through additional steps to do that.

Google has been under fire by photographers and publishers who felt that image search allowed people to steal their images. As a result, the company did a little change to the search engine. So, they came to a decision to remove the “view button” to protect the rights of photographers and publishers. A deal to show copyright information and improve attribution of Getty photos was announced last week and included these changes.

This update may have an intention of stopping people from taking the original image or to direct the users to the website where the image is located. So that the website may gain profit from ads that will pop up. This is a great news for publishers but an annoying one for the users. In that way, they have to wait for the website to load for them to save a picture.

But there’s one way for users not to go through all that hassle. If you right click, you can select “open image in new tab” or “view image”. And you’ll still be able to open up the full-size image. But since the “visit” button is the most visible one, that’s probably what they will end up clicking.

The update is good though because it just shows that Google is protecting the rights of the photographers and driving traffic to websites. But still, as a user, it’s somehow annoying to go through all that steps just to take a single photo.