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© Copyright 2003, Jim Loy
Broderbund's Clickart is a clip-art package which is very good, and very very bad. I've got the 300,000 images version. It contains a lot of good pictures (and sounds and borders and background wallpaper), but about 90 percent of them are almost useless, in my opinion, as the package contains almost no information about each picture, and the search capabilities provided are very crude. Every JPEG image can contain image title, artist's name, copyright info, and description. As far as I know, none of these 300,000 images contain any of this info. And so, is that painting by Renoir or not? That may be vital info for WWW authors. And it would certainly be an important search key for finding the painting among the several thousand images in the art/paintings folder on CD #3. But you cannot find all of the Renoir paintings on that CD, and you cannot find all of the animals of a certain species on another CD. There are several hundred mountain scenes, which mountains, which states, which nations? The filenames are relatively uninformative, like AHH50012.jpg. I have used many images from these CDs, but they have also cost me many dozens of hours searching for the right image. There was also some duplication, some invalid graphic files, and some pictures in the wrong folders, but a collection this big must contain some errors.
There are two books that come with this collection. They show almost every picture on the CDs, very small so you need a magnifying glass. One would think that the image title (and other info) might be found in these books; one was disappointed. I don't know if other clip-art collections are any better, or I would chuck this one in the garbage and buy something else.