truman-show

Kind of sounds like the low‑background steel [1] problem all over again. I have a rather badly written tool [2] I made about 5–6 years ago. If you connect it to your Google Custom Search Engine (along with the appropriate CSE keys), you can quickly search, copy, and download images from before 2022. It also has a ban list so you can filter out Shutterstock, Alamy, and other heavily watermarked sources. The app is a hot circle of garbage code, but it might still be useful as a starting point. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel [2] https://github.com/scpedicini/truman-show

It's also absolutely terrible for image search which has been absolutely poisoned by rampant proliferation of poor quality stable diffusion images - even on stock photo sites. It got so bad that I had to add a "No AI" flag to my image search app which limits the date range to earlier than 2022. Not a great solution but works in a pinch. https://github.com/scpedicini/truman-show

After Google continued to make it progressively more difficult to use their Image search to navigate/download to the actual image I wrote an image search tool that could be hot keyed from your OS to search the google image repository and copy to clipboard in a fast manner using a custom Google Search Engine id. About a year back I found that 90% of the results I was getting were AI generated, so I added a flag "No AI" which basically acts as a quick and dirty filter by limiting results to pre-2022. It's not perfect but it works as a stopgap measure. https://github.com/scpedicini/truman-show

I got sick of having to open a new tab, navigate to google images, type in my search just to find a quick one off image. Having to do that dozens of times was really taking me out of my workflow. I wrote a windows app that lets you quickly search google images and copy the original image to your clipboard for ease of use when chatting or if you need to paste a quick image into a document you are working on. It's GPL-3 in GitHub: https://github.com/scpedicini/truman-show