Google Images and Oiled Simians

I’ve recently been looking for some decent images I can display on a projector. I’m not a very artistic person so I’ve done the imaginative thing and gone on an Internet scavenger hunt. While Google images is actually a decent image search engine it’s got a couple of annoying quirks that I’ve been able to work around with a little application of Greasemonkey.

Firstly, when you click an image, you get sent to the containing page. This is very rarely what you want and makes you do a lot of needless hunting around the page for the image you wanted to see. Fortunately, the Google Images Re-Linker, written by Pat Cavit makes Google images do what you want most of the time; click the image and you get the image.

The other script I’ve found useful is one of my own, the clumsily named Default to large Google images. It does pretty much what the name says, it limits the initial images to those that Google considers large. It’s not going to be useful to many people but five lines of Javascript has made my own Google Image hunts a lot easier!