Microsoft Clip Art, along with office.com image library has been closed according to the announcement made by the company yesterday. Although over the past years, the images were rarely to never used due to simple google searches providing a wider array of more accurate and fitting alternatives, users all over the world expressed their nostalgia and disappointment over Microsoft’s decision.
Clip Art started off from a collection of around 80 images illustrating stick-men (Screen Beans) and basic imagery to a staggering amount of 100.000 downloadable static and dynamic images over the past 18 years, serving users of the Office package for work presentations, school papers and so on.
The images themselves are not going anywhere, but users of the Office package and respective sub-programs will notice the difference when they attempt to insert illustrations from the menu. Instead of the classic image library offered by Microsoft until now, Office will send customers to its Bing search engine that are cleared through the Creative Commons licensing system.
Ever since the announcement, Twitter has been filled with mentions of the scrapped Office feature that seems to have stirred nostalgic feelings for the 90’s generations, remembering their school years and early 2000 presentations. Despite the gallery not having recorded that much usage in recent years, people have begun a mass #RIPClipArt eulogy, posting old screenshots and admitting that it will be dearly missed despite it always being “a little cringe-worthy”.
Microsoft announced that ClipArt will not be parting from earlier versions of Office, but starting with the latest and from now on, it will no longer be a part of the program. The database of images will not be erased off the face of the planet either, its components just being a little harder to find. Fans and other people joining in on ClipArt’s remembrance have already starting putting up entire directories containing both old and newer images from the Office library to mark the “end of an era”, as internauts call it.
Microsoft has stated that they are positive and definitive about the change, saying that “Bing Image Search has higher quality images that are more up-to-date”. But Microsoft is known to occasionally bring back discontinued features in Office so only the future will tell what’s in store for program features.
