Same image file, different names - duplicate content?

[RonPK]

On a multilingual photo site I'm currently showing images by using a path like

/photo.php?id=123

I intend to make the file names a bit more useful with the help of mod_rewrite:

/photo/123/red-cat.jpg

Of course that isn't very useful for say Germans searching for red cats in German, so on the German pages I intend to use

/photo/123/rote-katze.jpg

And the same for the French and Dutch pages.

Does Google consider this as duplicate content? Will Google ban me? After all, red-cat.jpg and rote-katze.jpg are identical images, something Google can easily detect by file size and/or a CRC-check.

[tedster]

Google does not ban a site for duplicate content - it filters out all but one of the duplicates. I'd say you've got nothing to worry about.

From the Google Blog article:

Let's put this to bed once and for all, folks: There's no such thing as a "duplicate content penalty." At least, not in the way most people mean when they say that.

Demystifying the "duplicate content penalty" [googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com]

[aakk9999]

Why don't you use alt tag for other languages instead?

photo/123/red-cat.jpg alt="Red cat"
photo/123/red-cat.jpg alt="Rote katze"

[RonPK]

@tedster: thanks, I just wasn't sure whether that was true for images too.

@aakk9999: I'm indeed using the alt property too. A proper file name may be an additional help. Google even recommends [google.com] using proper file names: "Give your images detailed, informative filenames". It is probably easier for Google and other SE's to match 'rote katze' to 'rote-katze.jpg' than to 'red-cat.jpg'.