Maile Ohye, the Developer Programs Tech Lead is talking about the pros and cons of watermarked images in the Official Google Webmaster blog.
It is right that webmasters find watermarking images beneficial, so what is Google's take on watermarked images for Image Search?
One of the benefits of watermarked images is that photographers can claim credit or get recognized for their art. With a watermarked image, an unknown usage of the image is also deterred.
Search traffic is important to webmasters and they should consider the below given findings relevant to watermarked images:
- Users prefer high-quality images that have high-resolution and in-focus.
- Most of the users click on the quality thumbnails in search results. If the quality of pictures is high, they will look better in thumbnail size and will get more clicks.
- The image looks cluttered in thumbnail size if it has loud watermarked, borders and text over the image.
If you think that watermarking is reducing the user-perceived quality of the image or its thumbnail, there are chances of searchers selecting it less often. Therefore, it is better to preview the image at thumbnail size to know how users will take it.
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Hi,
Yes watermarked images are really useful.we can detect any modification of watermarked images, and the quality of watermarked images is very high because only a few bits of authentication data are embedded.
There is a way around that, if you use Joomla I beleive that the Phocca gallery component can let you choose to watermark the large image but not the thumbnail. There are also other ways to do this with mouse overs and javascript but is a lot of work!
I also know and open source software that can watermark thousands of images in one shot, it's called Fastone and is free.
Watermarks are truly usefull, don't know why all designers don't use them, it's just to easy to steal images via Flickr or Google images. Watermarking provides a serious barrier to plagiarism.
It depends on how much time you spent making the image. Watermarks can distort what you are really trying to say…for a quicky button I wouldn't use them.
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