[Scarlett.]

Earlier this month, Google and Getty Images announced a licensing deal that would allow Getty images in Google Images. As a result of this deal, Google agreed to make some fundamental changes to Images in an effort to reduce piracy, and the first of those has gone live today.

In addition to Getty Images working with Google “to improve attribution of our contributors’ work,” the deal included removal of the “view image” button next to results in Google Images — which would take users directly to the photo’s web URL. As of today, the button is gone.

Clearly Getty believed that this “view image” button led to rampant piracy of copyrighted content — including its own. While that’s surely true, the removal of the button is also an inconvenience to users who are looking to download legitimately free images from the web.

Fortunately, there’s an easy way around this — albeit one that most normal users probably won’t realize. If you right-click the image in Google Images, you can choose “Copy Image Address” in Chrome (or the similar button in other browsers), which you can then paste into the address bar to go the same page that “view image”previously took you to.

Read more

[Jessica.]

Horrendous

[y.winter]

I did find it weird that suddenly there was no "view" button and the excuse for it is quite laughable. Terrible decision. They should bring it back

[RichardG]

Originally Posted by y.winter

I did find it weird that suddenly there was no "view" button and the excuse for it is quite laughable. Terrible decision. They should bring it back

it looks so empty without the button

they need to bring it back

[Marches]

Silly people this achieves nothing just an inconvenience for everyone

[LaLaLand]

Such a ballache honestly.

[Toy Soldier]

With so many easy workarounds, surely this is totally pointless? I wouldn't even say its an inconvenience... It still takes seconds. I guess it's less obvious to those who don't know how to save an image? But are those people really the ones who are likely to be using copyrighted images in the first place?

[Toy Soldier]

I'd also bet that there will be a chrome extension / Firefox plug-in to restore the button almost immediately

[T*]

Idiotic