Search help
General searching
Type one or more words (or numbers) into Picture Australia’s search box; your search will try to find records which contain all of these words (or numbers).
- norman lindsay
- finds images with BOTH Norman AND Lindsay in the image descriptions.
Your search can be restricted by including a ‘-‘ before a word you DO NOT want included in the search:
- norman -lindsay
- only finds items that have Norman in the record AND NOT Lindsay, excluding works by or about Norman Lindsay.
- birds -eye
- finds images of birds without including birds-eye views.
Use double quotation marks " " for a very specific search:
- " norman lindsay"
- finds only that exact phrase and not Lindsay, Norman.
- "sydney harbour bridge"
- finds the images of the Sydney Harbour Bridge only and not other harbour bridges around Sydney
Use the star symbol * to find all variations of a word:
- norman lindsay*
- finds Norman Lindsay, Norman Lindsays, Norman Lindsay's, etc.
- fred*
- finds Fred, Frederick, Freddie, etc. Note that the search would not find Alfred however.
Advanced searching
You can make more complicated searches using the Picture Australia advanced search screen.
- with all of these words
- Find images which contain all of these words (or numbers)
- with the exact phrase
- This is the same as using double quotation marks to find images which contain an exact phase
- with any of these words
- Find images which contain any one of these words
- without these words
- Find images which don't contain these words
- taken by
- Find images created by an individual or group
- taken in the year
- Find images taken or created in a particular year
- Show images from
- Find images from any one of Picture Australia's many contributors or exclude a particular contributor. For example, to search for historical pictures exclude Flickr images.
- Display
- Choose the number of results displayed per page
Punctuation
Picture Australia ignores punctuation.
When searching for an image of Tyson's saw mills, tyson's mills and tysons mills, will find the same result.
Picture Australia is case insensitive and special character insensitive:
e also represents é, ê, ë, etc.
A search for Depot will also find dépôt.
An advanced search on browne, richard is equivalent to a search on Browne Richard.
Display of search results
Click on a thumbnail to see more information about the image. You can also add an image to your favourites or request a copy.
Full results display
On this screen you can see which agency owns the image, who created it, and view a larger version.
Display order
The search results are returned in relevance-ranked order. This takes into account where the search terms appear in the information about the image and whether an exact match was found. For example, the image title is considered more relevant than the image publisher.
When the service times out or is unavailable
Picture Australia will 'time out' if you have paused or been inactive for over 10 minutes during a search. If you try to explore links from your result sets once this has occurred you will receive an error message advising you to restart your search.
Link to a search result
Picture Australia has created a way for you to permanently link to a search results. These links can be used by other online services and can be used if you are posting information to Wikipedia or a blog. Use the following URL in front of your search term to create a linkable search that you can return to:
http://www.pictureaustralia.org/search/
For example:
http://www.pictureaustralia.org/search/ned+kelly
This keyword and search return results relating to Ned Kelly in Picture Australia.
The precision of your search can be improved by using quotes encoded as %22 to do a phrase rather than a simple keyword search.
For example:
http://www.pictureaustralia.org/search/%22ned+kelly%22