Google "Images" change hurting websites and photographers

Traffic on my website has been pretty consistent over the last several years. Suddenly in the last several days, it's taken a significant dive. Looking at the stats for my site, the source of the big drop is obvious...suddenly, not nearly as many people are reaching the site through google image searches.

The reason? Google has changed how they present image results (at least in newer browsers). When you type in "Gyrfalcon Photo", for example and look at the "Images" page, things initially look the same as they have. But now, when you actually click on the thumbnail image, it brings up the higher-res image in a zoom window, without actually taking you to the website where that image is hosted. People can now look at your full-resolution images on Google, without EVER actually visiting your website. They can also right-click and save your images directly from Google without ever visiting your own website.

The above shows what pops up now when you click on an image thumbnail in google. <b>Full-res, ready for someone to save, without ever visiting your site.</b> Note the very tiny text towards the bottom...it's Google's not very obvious message that "the image may be subject to copyright".

NOT a welcome change. For photographers, where website traffic may depend on Google rankings and image searches, the move definitely seems to be reducing actual web traffic to websites. With the very tiny message on copyright, it also makes me wonder how much this will increase online "theft" of photos.

Here's more. Good to see I'm not the only website person who is upset...

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-images-protest-16283.html

I agree Terry and I feel this should be addressed legally. It was at one point decided by the court that Google had the right to display thumbnails of images without being in violation of copyright laws but now they are displaying full size versions of the image and the person doesn't even have to go to our web sites or blogs. It isn't even just that, scrapers who steal images now have it easier than ever. Google has done an extreme disservice to photographers with this change and I would love to see a class action suit filed against them.

My traffic from Google image searches has also dropped dramatically since Google activated this.

By the way, I am considering blocking Google from searching my images. They have gone too far.

I've seen a lot of sites that have said they will block Google. I just hope enough people raise a stink, that Google backs off.

I too just can't see the legality of it. They're displaying, and allowing distribution, of full-resolution content from other people's websites, without taking the searchers to those websites. Just can't believe it could be legal.

What's funny about it...I actually have Google ads on my site (that may soon change). By limiting traffic to external websites, they limit their own advertising revenue.

This truly sucks, and cannot be legal.
So what can we do to prevent this?
We surely have attorney members at NPN - advice from them??
Class action suits?

Sandy

By the way, Google is hot linking to our images and are stealing bandwidth, there are Wordpress plugins that prevent hot linking and I'll be installing one soon to prevent this crap by Google.

As just a hobbyist I don't have nearly the stake in this as many of you do who count on photography for income, but it's still wrong and hugely disturbing to me. I offer any bit of support that you might want or need.

Definitely troubling.

How do we go about blocking google from free Wordpress blogs and from our personal web sites? I'm certainly considering doing both.

Does NANPA have a position on this yet?

You can use a robots.txt file to specify what files Google can crawl. I've never used it, because heck, you WANT them to access your stuff so people can find you on Google.

I've seen some suggestions to use this robots.txt file to only allow Google to crawl any thumbnails you have on your site, but not let it crawl the bigger images. Then, your bigger image wouldn't come up in Google Image Search.

That seems more like "revenge" than a solution though. It doesn't change the fact that traffic to your site will still go down. If you deny access to your images to Google, users will simply select one of the other billion choices on a google image search page.

Here's traffic to my website, just the part coming from search engines, over the last month. Note that Google search accounts for 90% of this. Can you guess what day Google implemented the new way they display the full-res images? Yes, it was January 25th.

Looking back the last 6 months, Google Search typically brought in around 400-600 visitors a day to my site. That immediately dropped the first day of Google's new search presentation, and has continued to drop since. It's now a 75% drop from before.

If a user sees your full-res images, displayed in all their glory on the Google page itself, there's just much less reason for people to continue on to your website.

I see Google hasn't implemented any sort of right click disabling so it's very easy for people to download the full res images.

To me, the most troubling aspect of this is the notion that Google is making it easier to download full resolution versions of images posted on the web. But I notice that I can easily do that by visiting your websites directly (at least on the four websites I checked quickly). Am I missing something? Certainly, I recognize, that does not solve the problem of Google making it far too easy to avoid visiting the source website in the first place.

To me it's not an issue of making it easier to download the images. As you say, at least on my site, you can right-click and download the image, just as you can when it now pops up in Google.

To me it's stealing content. It's one thing to put a thumbnail of an image up, to help searchers find your site. It's quite another to take full-resolution content and display it, without going to the source website.

Imagine the outrage if Google took whole pages of text from a website, and displayed them on Google pages. Users looking for that content would have no need to go on to the website itself. Google, in effect, becomes "one-stop shopping" for information content. It's no different with image content. With Google now displaying the full-resolution image from websites, many web searchers now have absolutely no need to visit the source website itself.

Here is a screen shot of what happened to my blog stats just from search engines, the red dot is January 25th.

I would love to file a class action suit about this. They can show a thumbnail but they have no business stealing bandwidth for the full size images, some people do not have unlimited bandwidth and this could cost them money. Does Google have the right to display my full sized image without going to my site? I really want to know that.

Rich, for self-hosted WordPress blogs it is easy for us to add the robots text, I think you have to pay WordPress.com to be able to do that. When I tried to change colors on Ron's WordPress.com blog (before I migrated his to self-hosted) he had to pay a yearly fee for me to make those changes.

Wow Mia, amazing similarity to the trend on my site. Interesting how it immediately crashed for both of us, then just keeps declining.

Yes, Terry, amazingly similar. Like you my traffic was pretty consistent and now... well those graphs speak for themselves.

My hits from google image search also plummeted immediately after they made the change.

More people unhappy with Google:

http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/websearch/AdDd-5hNuvg/dZAx57kKfrUJ

Sound off on Google's own Blog about this topic: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ca/2013/01/faster-image-search.html. I'm sure going to

I see the Bing image search is even worse. Not that I get much traffic from Bing, but amazing how Google ripped them off and used something similar.

On Bing, it also brings up your full-res image from your website, without actually going to your website. You can also download the image directly from Bing, without visiting the website. If anything, on Bing, it's even HARDER to see where the original image came from. On Bing, there's not even that tiny, tiny message Google has that "this image may be subject to copyright".

Precedent has been set by Bing, now Google is following suit.

I agree that Google should not be posting full res images that they don't own. They seem to always be throwing their hefty weight around.

I checked my blog stats. Google historically has accounted for roughly 25% of my visits. They actually increased to 50% of the hits since January 25th for my site. My site is a blogger site run by Google. I wonder if they are directing traffic to sites that they run or support. http://blog.greglessardphotography.com/

More...here's what Bing did....just a month ago, on December 18th.

http://www.webmasterworld.com/msn_microsoft_search/4529395.htm

And now the Google move a month later. Disgusting. Website content and copyright seems to mean nothing to Bing and Google.

Ugh, I read the link you posted above Terry and it is sickening. I think photographers are going to have to get together and file class action lawsuits against Google and Bing

I don't understand how this is legal...the heck with morality...the big wigs tossed morality out the window years ago..this has got to be just plain illegal!!

If it is illegal for a scraper site to hot link to my images and display them on their google blog how the hell is it legal for Google to do this? I send in DMCA takedown Notification to Google routinely when a google blog owner uses my image without permission and google is obligated to take my image down.

I have plugins activated on my blog that help to prevent image theft, and while I know that is not guaranteed to prevent all image theft it is there. Yet this is what is says on Wikipedia about the DMCA:

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a United States copyright law that implements two 1996 treaties of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). It criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services intended to circumvent measures (commonly known as digital rights management or DRM) that control access to copyrighted works.

Google is circumventing the program I have on my site to limit access to my copyrighted works. They are disseminating our copyrighted works.

Very sick situation and very 1984ish if you know what I mean. While Google may not be stealing copyrights outright just yet, they are stealing revenue from small businesses by allowing right click downloads which I am sure is illegal in some sense. So what can we do? Limit our exposure on sites like 500px, Flickr, Deviantart, Redbubble, Photo.net, or our own websites? I typed my name in a Google search and 100's of my images come up in Google images. Depending on which button I push, some go back to my website or some of the other websites I mentioned but still one option allows right click downloads. The very high resolution images on my website for printing purposes do not show up in Google images but I am sure it is just a matter of time...... so what to do?

Looks like Facebook was a mere pioneer into new web principles, doesn't it?

One week later. Total traffic on my site...down just about exactly 50% since the Google change.

The most telling...looking at the Google (ironically) adsense ads on my site. Ads on my PHOTO pages, pages often reached by people doing image searches...impressions down 74%. Only 1/4 the traffic going directly to my photo pages since a week ago, because Google searchers no longer have any reason to actually GO to my website, since Google is displaying the full-res photos from my site in Image Search.

I did a few quick tests on sending back different responses to these hotlinked requests. It looks like if you send back a "404 Not Found" response, a "302 Redirect" response, or send back a differently sized image, like an standard "Don't violate my copyright, please visit my www.something.com site", it ignores your response and just ends up using the thumbnail they have, scaled up to the size of your original image. But if you send back an image of the correct size it will use it, so that will give everyone, after some website tweaking, an option to send back a fuzzed out version, an error graphic, one with a huge watermark across it, or perhaps a thumbnail sitting in a larger image canvas, instead of your highres version. Doesn't really solve the traffic problem, but could at least protect your assets a little better.

Unfortunately Google is not including an HTTP Referer: header in these requests, which I read as an explicit attempt to get around the normal hotlink blocking, which is a bit more "evil" than I expected. To test I just sent back different responses to requests for any images that didn't include the Referer: header, which unfortunately, in production, would probably break some legitimate uses of your site, so something a little more sophisticated will be needed to detect these kinds of accesses for different treatment.

So THAT's it Jeff! I disable hotlinking, and now when you click on my images in Google Search, Google ignores that anyway and brings up a fuzzed out, upsized thumbnail, resized to the same size as the original photo.

That IS damn sneaky, and "evil".

But at least if you disable hotlinking, then when someone does a right-click to save your image on Google, it only saves the little thumbnail rather than the actual full-res image.

The downside? If you disable hotlinking, when someone goes to image search and sees a photo of yours that they're interested in, when they click on it and it brings up that fuzzed out, massively upsized thumbnail, the viewer is going to think it's a cruddy photograph, and they are probably even less likely to continue on to your website to look at it.

Ah how nice. Now that I've disabled hotlinking, when you click on "View Original Image" in google search, it just goes to an error page.

Yup, it will probably take a bit of new programming and configuration for everyone to respond to the new reality, assuming google sticks with it, to balance out everyone's competing priorities on traffic generation via image search vs. asset protection.

The downside? If you disable hotlinking, when someone goes to image search and sees a photo of yours that they're interested in, when they click on it and it brings up that fuzzed out, massively upsized thumbnail, the viewer is going to think it's a cruddy photograph, and they are probably even less likely to continue on to your website to look at it.

With a little more programming or configuration work you could detect this access and hand them a very watermarked version of the image instead, so they can see the full-res quality but probably not want to use it. And could even overlay a small text box in a corner that tells them they need to follow the "Visit page" link to see it in all its glory.

Ah how nice. Now that I've disabled hotlinking, when you click on "View Original Image" in google search, it just goes to an error page.

I don't know how much control your nginx server gives you, but for the new "View Original Image" link you do get "Referer" information from the browser, and it's a straight browser request, so at the server you can easily detect that and issue a redirect to a local landing page you could create that can display the requested image in the the context of your banners, links, website name, copyright info, etc. rather than just the bare image. I assume many people with assets to protect or hosting services that cater to image-centric websites are working on new tools and configurations along those lines right now. Hopefully it won't take too long to get more options out into the users' hands.

What a huge PITA, though.

And actually if you do an image search of "site:fansshare.com" you will get an example of a site that's already pretty much doing what I describe above - they grey out the full-res version with a header of "CLICK FOR FULL RESOLUTION" and change it so the "View Original Image" link takes you to the actual page, just like the "Visit Page" link.