Stump the PC Club is a free tech-advice column written by members of the North Orange County Computer Club, which has been in existence since 1976. Visit the club’s site at noccc.org.
QUESTION: I frequently need a picture for my son’s homework. This week it’s Billy the Kid. What’s the best place to find pictures?
PC CLUB: If you want a picture of Henry McCarty, better known as Billy the Kid, I’d start by going to http://images.google.com/ and search there. You can also search for Billy the Kid’s gun, Billy the Kid posters and so on. Once you find a picture you like you can right-click it and select Save picture as. If you just click the picture you will usually see a larger version of it. With this version, you can right-click it and select Copy. You can now paste it into a Microsoft Word document directly which helps with report writing.
Another thing that you can do is right-click the picture and select E-mail picture. This may not work on Windows 7 unless you have installed an email program such as Windows Live Mail which is free. See a previous article titled http://bit.ly/defaultemail.
When you save one of these images or pictures, the format or file type may vary. They’ll usually be JPGs, GIFs or BMPs. Any of these can be pasted into Word but if you’re looking for a specific file type you may have to use a photo editor to convert it. Also, the images vary in size and you may have to hunt a bit to find one that’s suitable.
You can try other sites such as http://www.picsearch.com/ when looking for pictures but it depends on the subject as to how good the results will be. I’ve found that Google Images has the widest variety.
Several things to be careful of when collecting pictures from the Internet include the following:
1. Treat any pictures that are copyrighted appropriately
2. Note where you save them so you can retrieve them when you need them
There’s a whole industry catering to those who are looking for a specific photo, they sell “Stock Photos”. Examples include www.fotolia.com and www.istockphoto.com. They have everything you might want but when I searched on one site for Billy the Kid, I found photos of various goats.
Ed Schwartz is a member of the North Orange County Computer Club. To send in a question, go to edwardns.com and click the Contact Me menu. Archives of previous columns are also on the website.