Bing Images Search by Layout

Searching for the right picture online involves more than just entering a search term and then praying that you find a picture that works best for you! You need to do a little more, and that "little more" may be as simple a task as using a filter on the Bing Image Search site. Several common filters are available to narrow down your search results on Bing Images Search, and one of these filters is Layout. With the Layout filter, you can restrict your search to pictures which are widescreen, square, or tall in orientation.

Follow these steps to get started using the Layout filter:

1. Access the Bing Image Search (US site). You can choose to access the US site since that’s the one we are following for now. We used "skies" as the search term for this tutorial (see Figure 1).
2. 
   Figure 1: Bing Images Search results
3. Do you notice the Filters bar on top of the search results in Figure 1, above? Do note that the fourth filter, Layout has been highlighted in red.

Changing Appearances?

Bing's Image Search page could change every day, and the screenshots and techniques on this page are current at the time of writing. Even if there are some changes, basic concepts explained on this page should be the same.

2. Click on the Layout button and it brings up the menu that you see in Figure 2, below.
3. 
   Figure 2: Options within the Layout menu
3. As you can see, this filter allows you to search the images by their orientation. Essentially, you can choose from 3 orientations. Additionally, the All option returns results of all orientations (see Figure 1, above). Let us now explore all these options:

All

4. This is the default option (see Figure 1, earlier on this page), and provides results of all Layouts (orientations).

Square

5. Allows you to search images which have common proportions, i.e. almost equal in width and height. Note that the results don't guarantee any exact square sized images, but it does come up with images that are almost near to square dimensions (see Figure 3).
6. 
   Figure 3: Results which have square-like proportions

Wide

7. Brings up pictures where the width is larger than the height (see Figure 4).
8. 
   Figure 4: Brings up results that are wider than taller

Tall

9. Limits your search results to pictures where the height is larger than the width (see Figure 5).
10. 
    Figure 5: Brings up results that are taller than wider
4. Do remember that you can always combine the different filters, and so it's quite easy to bring up pictures of skies that are Tall in Layout, are restricted to photographic types, use the color pink predominantly, and are also large in resolution (see Figure 6).
5. 
   Figure 6: Combine various filters to reveal the power behind Bing Image Search

Remember though that all pictures you find may not be suitable for use in your presentation slides or other projects. Learn how you can find pictures that are allowed to be used in our Bing Image Search by License tutorial.