Friday, August 14, 2009 at 9:00 PM
Webmaster Level: AllWe recently introduced a new feature on Google Image Search which allows you to restrict your search results to images that have been tagged for free reuse. As a webmaster, you may be interested in how you can let Google know which licenses your images are released under, so I've prepared a brief video explaining how to do this using RDFa markup.
If you have any questions about how to mark up your images, please ask in our Webmaster Help Forum.
25 comments:
I this right I have place a link for each photo? Sure I can had them using CSS, but I think it would be much better to add this license information to the meta information from the image
Good video information, but it takes the fun from users to feel the fact that they stole a picture and now they can use it in their desktop or blog, even their website too.
If that program RDF from creative is not for free, got to buy it?.
I does a good job, but once it is done with images, the most searcher engines will not spider it well.
This is a great post, Peter, and it's very exciting to hear that RDFa is helping out in this way.
There are a few other permutations for adding license information using RDFa, including a couple that are slightly simpler than the way you have done it here.
I've outlined them in the blog post Using RDFa to provide license information to Google Image Search.
All the best,
Mark
I agree with Olaf... the other way of doing this could be the use of sitemap specifically for images with information on the license.
It's good to see Google going public about its use and support of semantic markup like RDFa.
wow
this is good
Nice! I wonder if Google will now add such license metadata to their own pages as well (e.g. Picasa web pages with CC-licensed photos)?
What is this "about" attribute. It doesn't seem to be valid xhtml. Do I have to break all of my xhtml in order to indicate my photos are free to use?
I should have said also, this is a great new feature for Image Search -- it's just unfortunate I'll have to go back and update all my old posts with images to get the full benefit of it for my site. But thank you very much.
Scott Carpenter: no, the about attribute is not valid XHTML 1.0 or XHTML 1.1, but it is valid XHTML+RDFa 1.0.
So to validate RDFa pages, you will want to change your DOCTYPE to:
{!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML+RDFa 1.0//EN" "http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/DTD/xhtml-rdfa-1.dtd"}
(I've used curly brackets instead of angled brackets as I don't know what HTML this comment system will filter out!)
hi
great posting.....
http://proograms4u.blogspot.com/
Ugh, that code is ugly - I have to put a DIV and an extra anchor tag around my image to use this?
zakkap,
Wrapping the markup with a div is only one way to do it with RDFa.
There are others, some of which are much more compact, and they are outlined in my post Using RDFa to provide license information to Google Image Search.
Mark
This is a great post,
From
http://believe-or-not.blogspot.com
why not stick to the W3C specs: http://www.w3.org/TR/rdfa-syntax/
isn't this code more compact and just as useful?
{img src="photo1.jpg" rel="license" resource="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/" /}
(curly brackets instead of angled brackets here too)
Thanks all for your comments. The ultimate goal is to support multiple ways to tag images with licenses.
A couple of simple principles led us to proposing the markup described. First, it should be just as easy for users as it is for search engines to discover which license an image is available under. Second, the markup should be simple enough for webmasters to adopt.
We'd love to hear your ideas for how we could improve upon the proposed markup, drop us a line in the webmaster help forums.
It looks like a good use for RDFa, but I was wondering... If the image URI is "http://site.com/blog/content/img/2009/11/imagename.jpg" or something like it (which is bound to happen often), and I have to use that URI two more times, it gets ugly.
Isn't there a way to use the image's id, which in quite a lot of cases will be much shorter? One might even use a class and then be able to apply the license info (both human- and machine-readable) programmatically...
It would seem you have no custom processing to include wikimedia-hosted images in this. They already have license information attached, but not via RDFa. You could treat this site separately and greatly increase the quantity of images listed for certain licenses by parsing the license information. Alternatively, you could get the parsed info via dbpedia.
Just a note, please don't place valuable text information (such as the image tag example) *under* the closed captions.
Google Images stopped indexing images from my blog posts a few weeks ago. I also noticed the option for Image Search in my Webmaster Tools has disappeared. Is all that related to this discussion?
In other words, If I start adding this new attribute code to my images, will Google Images resume indexing them??
Thanks!!
I, too, agree with Olaf. The meta of images is now being used to store standard licensing terms.
Why not crawl the image meta, check to see if it has this standard license format, and then determine what kind of license it has based on this information?
Information on industry standard image licensing can be found at the PLUS Coalition's website
PLUS
Hi everyone,
Since over a year has passed since we published this post, we're closing the comments to help us focus on the work ahead. If you still have a question or comment you'd like to discuss, free to visit and/or post your topic in our Webmaster Central Help Forum.
Thanks and take care,
The Webmaster Central Team
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