Image Search
How Sarudo finds photos and animated GIFs, when each source is used, and how attribution works.
Why a Dedicated Image Search Tool
Image search is a separate capability from web search. Rather than scraping image results from a search engine (slow, unreliable, often blocked, and licensing-ambiguous), Sarudo uses two purpose-built, licensed image sources: one for high-quality photography and one for animated GIFs. Both are known-good sources with clear usage licenses. This means every image your AI employee finds is safe to publish, with attribution handled correctly.
Image and GIF search are included with your Sarudo instance — you do not need to sign up for any developer account or provide any API key. The integration is pre-configured and ready to use.
Photo Search — For Still Images
The built-in photo search is Sarudo's default for anything photographic — hero images, blog illustrations, landscape or portrait shots, product-mockup backdrops, anything where a high-resolution still image is the right fit. When your AI employee searches for a photo, it can also specify an aspect ratio (landscape, portrait, or squarish) so the returned images match the space they will live in. Photo search is the right choice any time the content is long-form and visual — blog hero images, newsletter headers, website banners, slide decks.
Finding a hero image for a blog post
Search for a photo for an article header.
GIF Search — For Reaction GIFs
The GIF search handles everything kinetic — reaction GIFs, short looping animations, anything that needs motion. Its sweet spot is social media posts and internal communications where a GIF conveys tone better than a static image. Your AI employee picks a GIF automatically when the context calls for an animated image (for example, a playful tweet, a Slack message, or a "celebration" reaction in a client update), and picks a still photo when the context calls for one. You can also explicitly ask for one or the other.
Finding a reaction GIF for a social post
Search for an animated GIF.
Attribution & Compliance
Both image sources require attribution, and Sarudo handles it automatically. Every image returned comes with pre-built attribution HTML and text — a photographer credit for photos and a source credit for GIFs, each with the required link back. When the AI drops an image into a blog post, social post, or email draft, the attribution is embedded in the rendered output — you do not have to remember to add it. Some sources also require a one-time usage ping when an image is actually used (not just when it is searched); Sarudo fires this automatically at publish time, satisfying the licensing terms without any manual work.
Do not strip the attribution from images the AI delivers. The photographer credit and source link-back are required by each image source's terms of service. If you need to rework how attribution is displayed (for example, moving it to a footer instead of an image caption), ask your AI employee to adjust the format rather than removing it.
How to Ask for an Image
You rarely need to pick a provider explicitly. Describe what you need — "a photo for the article on climate tech", "a GIF to react to the funding announcement", "a landscape header for the newsletter" — and your AI employee picks the right source based on context (photo vs GIF), resolution, and aspect. If you want to be specific, just say so: "search for a portrait photo of a laptop on a desk" or "grab a GIF of a cat typing". The AI will run the search, preview the top options, and drop the chosen image into whatever it is building — blog draft, social post, email, or slide.
Image search is used by the daily article drafter in the Content Calendar Pipeline to automatically source a hero image for each draft. If you deploy that pipeline, you never have to think about images at all — they just show up in the right place, correctly attributed.