I'm about to stop being a paying member, and here's why...

I've been a paying member since I found this website a couple of years ago, it has given me and my players several hours of fun. However, I'm about to start using another platform...and it makes me sad to have to.   The fact is that I simply cannot fathom the changes that were made to searching for tokens, portraits, etc.    What used to be a normal search that yielded (mostly) decent results now brings up a worthless list of tokens.  Finding something as simple as  an orc or a wolf has become far too tedious to warrant investing my time in creating adventures. It has been a good run, and I may check back in sometime to see if this has been fixed, but for now there are too many good alternatives to suffer through clumsy search tools. If I may inquire on my way out, why in the world was this horrible change made?   Does this not bother anyone else?

I'm sorry you're frustrated with the image searching. I'm assuming you mean you're disappointed in the web search results, and not the Marketplace results which have only grown and grown over the last couple years. The part that I find interesting is that the web search results haven't changed in years. We used a Google API to provide image searches until Google stopped supporting the technology. Our web search results haven't changed since that time. The only thing that changed is the appearance of the search results with the inclusion of the revamped Image Library. If you switch the search to the large icon view by pressing the icon next to the "Search:" label what you get is almost identical to what we had before the change. But, you wouldn't be the only person to have made this same claim. We've looked into replacements for web image searching but the options we researched were either not very effective or prohibitively expensive. Since, we support importing any image you could pull off a Google image search with a single drag, we haven't positioned replacing the built in web search at the top of our priority list.

I can't tell you what the change was, but there was certainly a change.   Search results now are cluttered with so many completely irrelevant hits that I can't even find tokens I've used (but not bookmarked) in the past.   I've been running the same campaign for some time, so many of my tokens were already in place, but in the last 2 months I've noticed when needing an encounter on the fly that literally 9 times out of 10 I settle for a token that doesn't even resemble the encounter.

We Are Devo said: I can't tell you what the change was, but there was certainly a change.   Search results now are cluttered with so many completely irrelevant hits that I can't even find tokens I've used (but not bookmarked) in the past.   I've been running the same campaign for some time, so many of my tokens were already in place, but in the last 2 months I've noticed when needing an encounter on the fly that literally 9 times out of 10 I settle for a token that doesn't even resemble the encounter. If you need a database of tokens buddy, I have a handy link for you if you send me a PM. It has all the monsters for D&D / Fantasy as tokens. This should help you out. Even if you can't get the results from google.  As for the change? I find its been a blessing to find my recently uploaded and my own database of images and maps uploaded! The change was pretty much only on the face and nothing to do with their searching system. On the point of google searches. I have found that searches for basic things such as "Hill drawings fantasy" Hits up nothing on Roll20 but loads on an actual google search. Not sure what happened? But I can't see it as too much a deal.

i find that now i need to create my own images with google images (offsite) and pintrest and then edit them in paint. lots of work for every npc/pc/monster thats why i use portrait tokens rather that the other type...

I'm having the same issue, finding images on the fly has become nearly impossible. Simple things like, "human" or "bandit", only bring up meme's, maps and dead bodies. Even if I type in the exact same search words as I had before the change, the images no longer come up, and they haven't been deleted as i still have them on some of my maps. It seems either irrelevant images aren't being filtered out as well as they were before, or relevant ones are being blocked. Edit: Other change I noticed is that when you drag the image on to the map layer, it no longer keeps the image's original size.

Having the issue here aswell, I've frequently been unable to find assets from my own campaigns. Leading me to have to remake the same tokens over and over, if I type in anything simple I will get a few free images, a ton of premium, and then 3d models most of the time. If it does pull images from my game, it's usually wholly unrelated. This was never an issue previously.

I agree with most of the comments here. The web searches for definitely feels like they produce much worse results now than e.g. a year ago. I had no problems relying on web searched tokens when starting to use Roll20, but it is my impression that the web searches were made worse in order to promote the use of marketplace tokens and maps. Try for example to search for tokens by common keywords like "Hunter" or "Warrior" and check the results from the web. However, reading Steve K's comment above my assumption might be incorrect. Also, I'm not 100% sure on this, but I think maybe previously it might have been harder to distinguish what tokens was searched from the web, and what was from free assets in the search result?

Gediablo said: I agree with most of the comments here. The web searches for definitely feels like they produce much worse results now than e.g. a year ago. I had no problems relying on web searched tokens when starting to use Roll20, but it is my impression that the web searches were made worse in order to promote the use of marketplace tokens and maps. Try for example to search for tokens by common keywords like "Hunter" or "Warrior" and check the results from the web. However, reading Steve K's comment above my assumption might be incorrect. Also, I'm not 100% sure on this, but I think maybe previously it might have been harder to distinguish what tokens was searched from the web, and what was from free assets in the search result? It VERY much appears to have been changed to favor paid assets, so I don't think your assumption is incorrect at all.   In my case, it has had the effect of me canceling my paid membership and I won't spend a penny with roll20 until its fixed.