Imagebank is an offshoot of the government agency, the N.C.T.E., National Centre for Technology in Education. The idea is that teachers and pupils can search for images that can be used for free for educational purposes. It’s been around for about a year. The reason I’m reviewing it now is because they’ve undergone a makeover.
The former web site had a kind of a Manga, Geek-chic look about it. This hasn’t completely disappeared but it has been toned down considerably. There is also a “popular tags” section, which outlines the most popular tags connected with the photographs. From the tags, it’s obvious to see that a guy called John Carey and another guy called Clive Timmons have taken quite a lot of photos. I don’t believe these are useful tags as they don’t tell us anything about the photos themselves (unless the photos are of the lads themselves).
The quality of the images are very good, generally. The search engine in it is excellent. Using three random words to search, the web site spat out 100% relevant images. There seems to be an endless amount of images – even though there are only about 3,500 in total. They tend to be heavy on the wildlife end of things so you’d have no trouble finding pictures of any animals!
However, I was fairly amused by one of their “boasts”.
ImageBank currently contains 3,380 images with 25% of these being of birds.
A whole quarter of their images are of birds – over 800 of their photos? This seems to leave them open to accusations of being “birdbrained” or being “for the birds” 🙂
I reckon that Imagebank will soon be an excellent image searchbank when they vary their content. If they don’t, it could be a case of: “This bird has flown.”
