Clip Art is dead. Make way for Bing Images

Clip Art should be a staple part of many people’s childhoods. In the days before we all really knew how to use search engines, any school project that had to be typed up will have been littered with Clip Art images (and Word Art). Sadly Microsoft is doing away with Clip Art’s online library in favour of something else.

The replacement is on the way, but whether it’ good news or not is up to you. The new system is called ‘Bing Images,’ and just typing that out made me shudder slightly.

In all honesty it makes sense for this change. Clip Art was almost never updated, and if you were stuck with an older version of Office then the images you had access to were seriously out of date. That being said there’s something comforting about some of the wacky and bizarre images that it included.

So what can we expect from Bing Images? It’s really not that different from the image search you would do in the Bing search engine (if you used Bing that is), except the images that pop up will automatically be filtered so that you only see images with a Creative Commons Licence. Basically that means you’ll only see images that you can use freely for almost any purpose, so you won’t be accessed of theft nor will you have to pay any licensing costs.

The era of the cake sale poster with cartoony images is over. Expect to see a lot more stock photos in the future.