Adding Alamy search engine to your web browser

[Johnnie5]

I was thinking how nice it would be to have the ability to right click on text and use that as a search term in Alamy for research purposes or to go directly to one of my images from one of contributor pages just using the image I.D. without having to open another tab, or if I am reading an article and want to check what images Alamy may have on the subject but finish the article first.  The big one is when I am going through "Have you found any Alamy Photographs" and only the image ID is present.  I can highlight the text right click and choose Alamy as my search engine and it will open in a new tab.  I contacted Member/Contributor services to see if they could help.  That was a no go.  I figured it couldn't be that hard so I did a little research this morning and came up with what you see below.

To add Alamy as a search engine in Chrome open the menu on the top right and choose settings, once there under the Search heading you will find the Manage Search Engines Button, click on that.  Scroll down to the bottom and there are three boxes.  In the first box type Alamy, in the second a keyword shortcut, I used the letter 'a'. IN the third box paste this http://www.alamy.com/search/imageresults.aspx?qt=%sThis does not enable the right click search it just adds alamy as one of the search engines.



The method I prefer is an add-on called Context Menu Search which gives you the ability to select text, right click,and then select which search engine to use. Once you have it installed it is fairly simple to either add one of the search engines from the list or create your own.  You can copy and paste the URL above to add the Alamy search engine.  This will enable you to have other search engines available with just a right click of the mouse.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/context-menu-search/ocpcmghnefmdhljkoiapafejjohldoga


In Firefox you will need two add ons, Search Engine Creator, the link is here:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/search-engine-creator/

After adding you will find the add on in the tools menu.  

The URL in Firefox for the Alamy search engine creation is:
 
http://www.alamy.com/search/imageresults.aspx?qt={searchTerms}

For the Alamy icon URL I went to the Alamy twitter page and copied and pasted the URL for the large A on the page.  The keyword can be anything you want from one letter to a word if you want.  I left description blank.


and Search Engine Manager at:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/search-engine-manager/

The Search Engine manager enables the right click flyout menu with all the search engine options.  You could add Tineye, Google images, picscout or whatever other search engine you like.  There is an extensive list here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search-tools/

I will apologize in advance if I omitted anything or got it wrong.  Let me know here if you have any trouble.  I will be in Yosemite tomorrow and unavailable.

[SShep]

Thanks for this Johnnie5, it looks really useful. 

 

I use Firefox and couldn't get Search Engine Manager to work so have used Context Search instead which works fine.  For anyone else doing this, I've used the search URL:  http://www.alamy.com/search.html?qt={SearchTerms}

Cheers,

Steve