Bing may not be the most popular search engine and that title goes to Google, but it has some great features you probably never realised existed. Like this one to save and organise media.
If you often search for images and videos, and use them in projects, schoolwork, and other purposes, you might find Bing’s ability to save and to organise media into collections very useful.
You search for the photos or videos you need and when you see something interesting that might be useful, you don’t immediately have to download it and save it on the computer’s disk.
Instead, media files can be saved online in the Bing search engine. It has a sort of clipbook that can be used to save photos and videos and places.
Your saved items can be organised into groups or collections and this is a great idea if you are researching for work, education, hobbies or your website.
Many collections can be stored in Bing’s saved items and you can return to them at any time and browse the items, view them, download them, or add more photos and videos.
If you have not yet discovered this useful feature of Bing, perhaps because you always use Google out of habit, you should take a fresh look at Microsoft’s search engine. It is not like Google and in some ways it is better.
Let’s see how to save photos, organise them into collections and then browse the items. It can be done with videos as well and both work in an identical manner.
1 Search with Bing
Go to the bing.com website and type in the search term. I am going to search for lions, but obviously you can search for anything that interests you. As the search term is entered, there is a drop-down list of suggestions.
2 Save the images
Select Images in the menu bar at the top to view a page of thumbnail images, lions in my case.
Move the mouse over an image and in the bottom left corner is a plus button. This enables the image to be saved to Bing. (The icon to the right of plus is used to find similar images.)
3 Move saved images
I performed another search, this time on tigers. When an image is saved, a confirmation message is displayed and it has a couple of links, Move to and See all. Click Move to.
4 Create a collection
Bing knows what the image contains and it automatically creates collections based on the subject. I have saved lions and tigers from two searches, so I have two groups.
You can create your own collections by typing the name into the box at the top. You could name it after the project you are working on and collecting media for. I am going to create of called Big Cats.
5 The Bing menu
The items that were saved, such as photos or videos, will still be there tomorrow or whenever you need them. You can add more items at any time. After saving a few items, click the menu button in the top right corner and then select My saves.
6 View your saves
The links on the left enable you to view images, photos or videos. Here are the items I saved. There is a collection called Big Cats, then there is tigers below, and off the bottom of the screenshot is lions.
7 Move saved items
Suppose you want to move an item from one collection to another, or maybe even remove it. Move the mouse over the image or video and click the box in the top right corner to select it.
A menu is displayed at the top of the page with Move to and Delete.
8 Move saved items
An existing collection of saved items can be selected or a new one can be created.
9 View saved items
Click a thumbnail image of a photo or video to view it in the browser. Arrows at the left and right enable you to go to the next saved item or the previous one. A tray of thumbnails at the bottom shows the next and previous items.
10 The actions menu
Click the three dots in the bottom right corner to display a menu of actions. You can view the page or the source image on its own, an image can be saved to OneNote or Pinterest.
Play all results makes a slideshow of your saved items, which is a great way to view a collection of items.
This is a fascinating feature of Bing and it makes the search engine stand out from the others - Google, Yahoo! and DuckDuck Go. Is this a feature you will use?
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