written by Janice Schwarz of GeekArtist Web Solutions

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).

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.

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.

Tags: free images, GeekArtist, web design

This entry was posted on Friday, April 30th, 2010 at 9:02 am and is filed under DrakNet Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.Both comments and pings are currently closed.