With unauthorised image usage arising from Google search results continuing to be a problem for photographers trying to make money from their pictures, Google has teamed up with stock library Shutterstock to launch a new ‘Licensable’ badge feature.
When you specify license information for images on your website, the image can display with a Licensable badge on image thumbnails in Google Images. This tells people that license information is available for the image, and provides a link to the license in the Image Viewer, which offers more detail on how someone can use the image. This feature is available on mobile and desktop, and in all regions and languages that Google Search is available.
“Google Images’ new features help both image creators and image consumers by bringing visibility to how creators’ content can be licensed properly,” said Shutterstock’s Paul Brennan. “We are pleased to have worked closely with Google on this feature, by advocating for protections that result in fair compensation for our global community of over 1 million contributors. In developing this feature, Google has clearly demonstrated its commitment to supporting the content creation ecosystem.’
To find out how to add the badges to your images, see here – there are quite a lot of conditions, but should be relatively straightforward.
