Metadata and Google

[Ed Richards]

Does Google pick up image metadata for indexing? Since my images come from LF scans, I have not paid attention to adding metadata to images on the WWW and I am wondering if that is a mistake.

[Frank Petronio]

It's a good way to establish copyright in cases of casual "borrowing"... also if a stock photo buyer comes upon your image in their search, there is your contact info. So I do it with everything -- in Adobe Bridge you can select all and hit "Append Metadata" to add your preset data for each year.

But idk about Google. It's probably secret.

[PenGun]

Does Google pick up image metadata for indexing? Since my images come from LF scans, I have not paid attention to adding metadata to images on the WWW and I am wondering if that is a mistake.

Stick a robots.txt in the root dir the images are in. In mine, a simple .txt file:

#go away
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Call it robots.txt and Google's reaper bots should stay out.

You can be more specific than my blanket denial:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=40360

There really should be no problem with stuff just on your drive. The bots that stray from web roots are not Google's and will pay no attention to robots.txt. ;)

[Frank Petronio]

Yeah but he WANTS Google to find his stuff!

[Preston]

Ed,

For images you have on your web pages, use the Alt attribute in the image tag. Search bots do look at these. Aside from indexing, the Alt attribute is picked up by screen readers for those who have vision problems, so using it is a good idea for accessibility.

Keep in mind that metadata included in images increases file size.

-Preston