Posts Tagged ‘image’

Google image search parameters

Here are some useful documents if, as a developer,  you want to use the Google Image Search API.

I used the Google Image Search API in an earlier piece called dbCinema, but this piece was done in Adobe Director. Since then, I’ve retooled to HTML5. So I looked into using the Image Search API with HTML5.

First, the official Google documentation of the Google Image Search API is at developers.google.com/image-search/v1/devguide. It’s all there. Note that it’s “deprecated”. It won’t be free for very much longer, for developers. Soon they will charge $5/1000 queries. But the documentation I have put together does not use a key of any kind.

Perhaps the main thing to have a look at in the official Google documentation is the sample HTML file. It’s in the section titled “The ‘Hello World’ of Image Search”. This automatically does a search for “Subaru STI” and displays the results. But wait. There is a bug in the sample file so that if you copy the code and paste it into a new HTML file, it doesn’t work. I expect this is simply to introduce the seemingly mandatory dysfunction almost invariably present in contemporary programming documentation. Unbelievable. I have corrected the bug in vispo.com/typewriter/Google_Image_Search2.htm, which is almost exactly the same as “The ‘Hello World’ of Image Search” except it gets rid of “/image-search/v1/” in a couple of places.

After you look at that, look at vispo.com/typewriter/Google_Image_Search3.htm. Type something in and then press the Enter or Return key. It will then do a Google image search and display at most 64 images. 64 is the max you can get per query. The source code is very much based on the official Google example. The image size is set to “medium” and the porn filter is turned on. Strange but true.

Finally, have a look at vispo.com/typewriter/Google_Image_Search4.htm. This example shows you how to control Google Image Search parameters. The source code is the same as the previous example except we see a bunch of dropdown menus. Additionally, there is an extra function in the source code named setRestriction which is called when the user selects a new value from the dropdown menus.

There is a dropdown menu for all the controllable Image Search parameters except for the sitesearch restriction, which is simple enough if you understand the others.

Anyway, that ought to give you what you need to get up and running with the Google Image Search API.