Image search options with major engines

Google has just announced via their weblog that it's now possible to limit image searches to photographs via the advanced search function. This is helpful because a lot of people (myself included) will save screenshots as .jpg files rather than .gif. It's easy enough to do - just click on the advanced search link and choose 'photo content'. Other options include news content and faces. You end up with something that looks like this:
To give Google their due they did point out that Live do provide rather better image functionality, so I took a quick look at that myself. Indeed - there's more that can be done:

You can refine searches by size, shape, colour, style and facial options.

Yahoo really wasn't that impressive at all, allowing searchers to limit by size and colour:

Ask is also fairly limited, with options such as size, file types and colours. However, there are functions that you can use with Ask that they just don't make available. You can limit to watercolours for example - try a search for watercolour trees and see what you get.

 Finally, Exalead also provides image search and their offering is pretty much as impressive as Live - limiting by size, orientation, content, colour and filetype.
There are of course many other image search engines that just look for images for you and I've written about a lot of these in my image search section of the weblog, so if the above offerings don't excite you, try some of the ones that I've talked about there!