Quick Guide to Using ImageQuest

PCC offers faculty, staff and students access to over 2,000,000 images in the ImageQuest library, all available for PCC-only non-commercial educational use.

Here's a quick summary of how to use ImageQuest, including specific tips for faculty using these images in D2L Brightspace.

Step 1: Access ImageQuest and Take a Quick Tour

Access ImageQuest and, if you're accessing ImageQuest from outside the PCC domain, enter your PCC User Name and Password. For a quick tour, view ImageQuest's two-page Guided Tour (PDF). For further information, you can also visit ImageQuest's Help pages.

Step 2: Search for Images

To quickly search for images, do the following:

1. Enter your search term(s) in the field labeled "What would you like to see today?". Tips: use quotation marks for phrases and use Boolean operators such as AND, OR, and NOT. The case (upper case vs. lower case) doesn't matter.

2. Hit Return/Enter on your keyboard or click on the Search icon (the magnifying glass).

Step 3: Gather Your Images in My Images

Use the image size slider at the top of the page to increase or decrease the image display size.

Once you find images you might want to download, you can add each of them to a personal repository called My Images. My Images is a good way to collect all potential images on one page, compare them, decide which best suit your needs, and then download multiple images all at once. Note: the My Images repository is cleared every time you close your browser window.

To add images to My Images, select the image you would like to keep and choose the To add images to My Images, select the image you would like to keep and choose the

Once you've added images to your My Images repository, you can access your images via the My Images links and/or the View All My Images link.

Step 4: Download the Images

You can either download specific images or download them all at once. To download images individually, select the image and choose the Download tab. To download an entire collection of images, first switch the Select Multiple Images function to On, mark the images for download (or choose Select All), then choose Download.

Your download will be in the form of a ZIP file named "media.zip". This file includes your images plus a file named "media.txt" which contains information about each of the images you downloaded. The text in the Caption field can be used as your alt text (see Step 6).

Step 5: Resize the Images

If you're a faculty member using these images in D2L Brightspace, the images need to be resized smaller so that they fit within the D2L Brightspace environment and your students are not forced to scroll horizontally to see your content. To resize the images, use your favorite image editor or a free image editor such as Pixlr, available as the Pixlr Express online version or the Pixlr Express mobile version.

The recommended sizes for images in the D2L Brightspace environment are as follows:

• Course Home page wider column (the Announcements widget, for instance): 600 pixels maximum width

• Course Home page narrower column: 290 pixels maximum width

• HTML page within a course: 660 pixels maximum width

Step 6: Add the Images and Alt Text to Your D2L Brightspace Course

When you use Insert Stuff in the D2L Brightspace HTML Editor to add an image to an email or discussion message, the alt text for that image can be copied from the media.txt file you downloaded from ImageQuest. Consider whether the alt text provided by ImageQuest is contextually appropriate for your students, adding or deleting words from the alt text as necessary to best explain the image to students in the context of your course.