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Beholder - Internet image searches made easy Pick of the Week
Beholder imageThe macosxhints Rating:
8 of 10
[Score: 8 out of 10]
When I went looking for a screenshot of DarkForest (see my comment to last week's Pick of the Week), I fired up an app I've been meaning to try for a while - Beholder. Beholder allows you to easily search for images on any of three pre-defined web sites (Google images, AllTheWeb, and AltaVista). If you have some HTML knowledge, you can even create your own search engines for other image sites -- you just need to be able to dissect the URL that the engine spits out and input it into Beholder's prefs. One quirk is that, by default, the searches are named "Default Set (1)," "Default Set (2)," and "Default Set (3)." I just opened the prefs and renamed them to reflect the services they search. Using Beholder is simple - enter your search term, pick an engine, and hit Start.

As seen here (full size image), you get an iPhoto-like browsing interface for scanning the results. Thumbnails are on the left, and on the right you get a "zoomed" version of the image, along with relevant URLs (copy and pastable, or clickable) for the image, the page, the search link, and any associated image text. Double-click an image and it opens in a new window and you can save it to your hard drive.

Watson and Sherlock, of course, both have image search features. Sherlock only searches Getty for licensed images, and Watson doesn't include the Google search engine (in either the Google tool or the Image tool), so many pages aren't found -- for instance, the DarkForest screenshot I found on Google wasn't found by Watson's Image tool.

The one nit I have with the program is relatively minor -- search results open to full-screen size, though a quick click of the green button will get you a nice "minimal" browsing window -- you see one image and the URL information, and can page through them with the up and down arrows. If you resize the results window, though, those settings are not remembered on the next search. The window type (normal or minimal) and window size settings should be user-controllable; I don't really like it when an application takes over my entire screen.

Yes, you could use this tool to steal images from the web ... but then again, if that's your intent, you could do it just as well from Google's image search page! Used properly, Beholder makes it easier to find those obscure image references you might need for a project ... or a Pick of the Week comment :).
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Beholder - Internet image searches made easy
Authored by: jpbjpbjpbjpb on Nov 18, '03 04:51:57PM

My only complaint is that it's packaged as an Apple Installer package instead of as a draggable application in a disk image.

If you're not installing kexts, your application has no business being in a .pkg



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Beholder - Internet image searches made easy
Authored by: robg on Nov 18, '03 06:13:22PM

Yea, I forgot to mention that. I dug through the .pkg before installing, and it's clearly nothing more than the app itself. Not sure why he packaged it that way.

-rob.



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Beholder - Internet image searches made easy
Authored by: fxt on Nov 18, '03 05:33:14PM

if would be more useful to me if the sizes of the images were shown. when you enter a search on the google search page, their results come back with the pixel dimensions and the number of bytes in the image file. this is important to me because i strongly prefer high quality images. i mentally toss away any small sized images as i scan the google results page.

so, this is a suggestion for beholder! not only return the image sizes and/or dimensions, but offer to filter the images on that size. for example, only display images larger than, say 100 kb.

fxt



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Beholder - Internet image searches made easy
Authored by: 1e6 on Nov 18, '03 10:25:46PM

FYI: wrt .pkg vs .dmg, the developer's website (I followed your link) plainly says: "Note: Beholderâ„¢ is packaged as an Apple Installer (.pkg) only to present its end user license agreement. Only the application will be installed on your machine."



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Beholder - Internet image searches made easy
Authored by: jpbjpbjpbjpb on Nov 19, '03 12:21:18AM

You can make dmg files present a license agreement when opened, so that's not a good enough reason to use pkg

I really really hate pkg format. I don't like the idea of some random developer getting to run a script in their postinstall with administrator privileges. If Beholder hadn't been reviewed here, I would have just tossed the pkg without installing it.



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pkg installer
Authored by: lstewart on Nov 19, '03 11:26:00AM
To the critics of the pkg installer, it may be worth noting that unlike most packages I've encountered, this one did NOT ask me for an administrator password before running. I assume this is because it did not need to touch anything outside my Applications folder.

An installer package may or may not ask for an administrator password. If it does, and you give it one, then you've basically given it free reign/carte blanche to do anything on your hard drive. But if it doesn't ask for a password, how dangerous is it really?

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pkg installer
Authored by: osxpounder on Nov 21, '03 02:18:43PM

That's a good question, and I wish I knew the answer. I also wonder, speaking of permitting scripts to run on one's Mac, whether it's safe to use Safari, given that there's now a way to run AppleScript from a URL. I don't know the details of that -- which I suppose is why it scares me.

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osxpounder



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