HuskyPup - 3:29 pm on Jan 25, 2013 (gmt 0)

Can anyone confirm that the full-size view hotlinks the image from the source server rather than using a cached copy from Google's servers?

According to Google:

The source page will no longer load up in an iframe in the background of the image detail view.

I assume this means they will be displaying a cached copy of their own.

This speeds up the experience for users, reduces the load on the source website’s servers,

I wonder what size image they will use since, when I tested it last weekend, it showed up to about a 600 x 600 and anything larger was shown smaller. For the last year or so all of my images have been watermarked and created either at 600 x 800 or 800 x 600 ... different widget images for different widget purposes in case you're wondering.

and improves the accuracy of webmaster metrics such as pageviews.

I have to agree that this is a very valid point. I have thousands of unique and original specialist widget images with many visitors simply viewing those images either for project ideas or to confirm what they may have seen at a dealer's was correctly named and also to view the variation of the product...it's natural...

Obviously the CTR is very low but if visitors still click through I'll be more than happy but if they simply surf Google images and I get nothing, well, I'll just have to re-think how I present them and I already have that in mind.