Google Image Search: Not Free Images
I’m overdue for another post. Things get hairy when you run a business from home, have infant twins, and the air conditioning goes out. In many parts of the country, that’s not a big deal in May, but in Texas it can be HOT! We have babies and ferrets, so it meant several days of little work, no fun, and no sleep.
Meanwhile, here is a post I originally wrote for DrakNet that was posted April 30, 2010.
I thought I’d share it here for those that may not follow the DrakNet blog and also because this site is basically an extended FAQ covering issues I deal with all the time from clients. Google image search and copyright are recurring themes in my line of work.
I get a lot of images from clients to put on websites. Because I like to educate and protect my clients, I am prone to asking, “Where did you get this from?”
More often than not, the response is: “Google’s free image search”.
Let me clear up a common misconception: the image search on Google is not a repository of free images for everyone. What Google is doing is searching images on other people’s websites and showing those images to you. These are images that are protected by copyright law.
Why use Google image search?
For one, it’s handy if you just want to see what something looks like. For example, hey what does a vole look like?
Sometimes, creative types such as graphic artists may use it to jog some ideas loose.
I have used it to locate stock photography that I wanted to purchase. Type in a subject and the word stock and you’ll hit a lot of stock photo sites real fast.
Now some of you may read this and panic a bit thinking, “Wait, what about MY images?”
Protecting your images
If you want to find out if Google is pulling images from your site, try typing one of your file names into Google image search. However, if all you use are generic file names such as logo.gif, that’s just not going to tell you anything (other than how many others use that same file name).
(The following section is a bit geekier than I usually get for this site, but was appropriate for DrakNet customers. For those who have me design sites for you, this just tells you what I’ll be doing. You really don’t need to know this though. You can skip down to the non-geeky version.)
{Start Geeky Bit}
I keep Google from using images from my site but using my handy robots.txt file. Robots.txt is a file you can add to your site’s directory that tells search engine robots what they can and can’t add to their directories. At DrakNet, you would put this in your public_html folder.
These two lines are what I use:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /images/
You would use Disallow and whatever you have named your image folder. If you leave images all over your site willy nilly, then this is isn’t going to help you.
You can learn more about robots.txt here.
{End Geeky Bit}
As a general rule of thumb, if you
• Didn’t make it
• Didn’t hire someone to make it for you
• Weren’t given permission by the image creator to use it
Then you shouldn’t use it on your site. Remember this any time you see anything online, be it images, audio, video, or written text.
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