How can I tell Google that the images on my site are free to use, no license needed?
I have a lot of autogenerated images with famous quotes. They are ranked on Google but do not show up if I choose the free to use option.
Thank you 🙂
Mark_A
2:41 pm on Jun 9, 2020 (gmt 0)
I don't know the answer, I would look at the pages & images listing as free to use, and see how they encoded their images / pages / website.
lucy24
4:37 pm on Jun 9, 2020 (gmt 0)
I did some exploring (search for images of cats seemed a safe starting point with plenty of hits ;)) and quickly arrived at (a) “Information extracted from IPTC Photo Metadata” and (b) Google page about copyright [support.google.com] which in turn points to Creative Commons license info [creativecommons.org]
Even if you constrain the search to “labeled for reuse”, there will still be the boilerplate about “may be subject to copyright”, indicating that G themselves are hedging their bets.
Further exploration reveals that the “IPTC metadata [iptc.org]” line was bit of a red herring, because most images don’t include it. In fact, any image I personally put online is first stripped down to image-only format, no metadata. (If I could figure out a search that would bring up my own images*, I would investigate further.)
* Logs tell me that such searches definitely exist, I just can’t replicate them.
