I been there many times... Hunting through Clipart CD's and magazines trying to find pictures for my website. It can be a very daunting task as all I seem to get hold of is rubbish.

To give you more of an example. Recently I was building a website for a client and I needed to get hold of a map of the United Kingdom so I could plot some points to where his regional offices were located. Ok, I could have scanned a map out of a text book but you have to be slightly carefull with any copyright issues. I might have decided to buy one, but sometimes cost is an issue.

I spent the next two hours surfing the web for maps of the UK but with no avail until I come across Altavista's fantastic image search system. This is the exact tip I want to tell you about today.

Altavista have created this search style facility which allows you to search a database of links to particular pictures which have been gathered from all corners of the internet during there main search indexing process. As the robots crawl through the web, they catalog any pictures which appear on each of the websites. Ok, the odd piece of rubbish might get chucked in there for good measure but really this is an excellent facility. It also filters any pornographic images so this facility is open to everybody.

All I did was enter my search word as "ukmap" and bobs your uncle, dozens and dozens of uk maps appear. See the screenshot below.



All you then have to do is click on the image and it will take you to the website which contains the picture. You can then capture it by right clicking on the picture and clicking save as.

Some important advice obviously is that you must check for any copyright issue's before you steal somebody else's work. Usually you would find some copyright information on the site. Be sure to check this!

Another important point on using Altavista's service is to make sure the drop down box for Partner Sites is set to none. If you don't do this, you will get commercial images which you have to pay for. See below.



Ok, you are probably waiting to give this a try. Why not! Point your web browser to:

   http://www.altavista.com/

And then click on the "images" selection which is about half way down on the left hand side!

Good Luck.