Case Study 1 — Google Images, Getty, and the "View Image" Button: How Image Search Learned to Send Traffic Back

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Case Study 1 — Google Images, Getty, and the "View Image" Button: How Image Search Learned to Send Traffic Back

Type: Real, public event analysis, drawn from Google's own announcements and widely-reported, documented industry history. The two events at its center — the 2018 removal of the "View Image" button and the 2020 introduction of image-licensing metadata and the "Licensable" badge — are matters of public record. No statistic is invented here; where exact figures are unknown, the text says so and reasons from the mechanism instead.

Background: an image-search product that helped users and starved publishers

For most of its history, Google Images was a wonderland for searchers and a quiet grievance for the people whose images filled it. You searched, you saw a grid of pictures, you clicked one, and Google showed you the image itself — large, and with a prominent "View Image" button that opened the full-resolution file directly, on Google's interface, without your ever visiting the website the image came from. For a user hunting a desktop wallpaper or a reference photo, this was delightful. For the photographer, publisher, or business that created the image, it was a problem: their work drove the search, and they got no visit, no context, no credit, and no traffic. The image had been effectively decoupled from its source.

This tension came to a head with Getty Images, one of the world's largest stock-photo agencies, whose business is licensing images. Getty had long argued that Google Images' design encouraged people to take images without visiting — or paying — the source. In 2017, Getty filed a competition complaint in Europe. In early 2018, Google and Getty announced a licensing partnership, and — as part of the broader resolution — Google made a change that reverberated through the entire image-SEO world.

The event: Google removes "View Image" (February 2018)

In February 2018, Google removed the "View Image" button from Google Images worldwide. After the change, clicking a result no longer handed you the raw image file on Google's page; to see or save the full image, you had to visit the source website. Google also adjusted the "Search by image" button around the same time. The mechanism of the change was small; the strategic message was large.

FIGURE C1.1 — "Before and after the button vanished"                 [after a public 2018 Google change]
  BEFORE (pre-2018)                          AFTER (Feb 2018 onward)
  Grid → click result → "View Image"         Grid → click result → to get the full image,
    opens the full file on Google              you must VISIT the source page ("Visit")
  Searcher rarely visits the source          Searcher is routed toward the source page
  Publisher: image used, no visit, no credit Publisher: a real path to a visit (and context)

Read what that did. Overnight, the friction of getting an image without visiting its home page went up, and the incentive to click through to the source went up with it. Google had re-tuned its image product to send more traffic — and more attribution — back to the sites that made the images. For anyone doing image SEO, the lesson landed immediately: the source page matters again. An image was no longer a free-floating file to be grabbed; it was tied, once more, to the page that hosted it and the words that described it.

📄 Read the Report

text FIGURE C1.2 — "What the 2018 change signaled to publishers" [after a public 2018 Google change] THE SOURCE Google's public statement and widely-reported coverage of the "View Image" removal, tied to the Google–Getty licensing agreement. WHAT'S THERE The direct-to-file button is gone; users are routed to the hosting page; a licensing deal with a major stock agency sits behind it. WHAT IT SHOWS Google can, and does, re-tune image search to shift value toward the sites and creators that own the images — pushing image search closer to the rest of SEO, where the source page and its context are what count. WHAT IT DOESN'T It did NOT publish click-through numbers, did NOT promise publishers more traffic, and did NOT make image search a solved problem — user behavior and later features kept shifting. Treat the direction as real; resist inventing a percentage. THE MOVE Optimize the PAGE the image lives on — descriptive alt text, relevant surrounding content, a sensible filename — because image search increasingly rewards the source, not a decontextualized file. THE LESSON When a platform changes to favor the creator of value, align with the change: describe and host your images well, on pages worth visiting.

The sequel: licensing metadata and the "Licensable" badge (2020)

The 2018 change routed traffic toward sources. The second act routed credit and licensing — and it is the part that directly redeems this chapter's §11.7. In 2020, Google introduced support for image-licensing metadata: creators could mark up images with license information, either through IPTC photo metadata embedded in the image file or through Schema.org fields, specifying the license terms and a page where the image could be licensed. Google then began showing a "Licensable" badge on eligible images in Google Images, along with links to the license details and the creator's terms.

This is the documented, real use of embedded image metadata that §11.1's "EXIF myth" callout pointed to. Geotagging your JPEGs to chase local rankings does nothing; embedding IPTC licensing and credit information does something concrete and public — it surfaces a licensing path and attribution right on the image result. For photographers, stock agencies, publishers, and any business whose original images have commercial value, this turned "metadata" from folklore into a tool with a specific, sanctioned payoff.

What it shows

Three transferable ideas, each larger than the events themselves:

Image search is not a separate universe from SEO — and Google keeps pulling it closer. The 2018 change re-anchored images to their source pages; the 2020 change added creator attribution and licensing. Both moves reward the same fundamentals this chapter teaches: describe your images, host them on good pages, and (if they have licensing value) mark them up. The decontextualized-file era is over.
Platforms re-tune to favor the creators of value — align with that, don't fight it. A business whose image strategy in 2017 was "stop people from stealing my images" was fighting the tide. A business whose strategy became "make my images discoverable, well-described, and properly licensed on pages worth visiting" was swimming with it. The durable move is always to make the genuine asset legible, not to hoard it.
The honest limit: Google giveth the tuning, and Google can taketh it away. None of these features is a contract. Google changed image search unilaterally in 2018 and added metadata support unilaterally in 2020; it can change either again. Image and visual search are channels you can earn a place in, never surfaces you control — the same clear-eyed posture the whole book keeps.

Outcome

There is no single villain or hero here, which is the point. Searchers lost a convenience (the instant full-file button) and kept a better-attributed, source-connected image search. Publishers and creators gained a clearer path to traffic and, later, to credit and licensing. And image SEO quietly matured: the field moved from "how do I stop Google from giving my image away" to "how do I make sure Google understands, credits, and routes people to my image" — a healthier question with real techniques behind it (alt text, page context, IPTC metadata, sitemaps).

The practitioners who adapted did the unglamorous work: they described their images honestly, improved the pages those images lived on, and — where it mattered — added licensing metadata. The ones who kept treating image search as a threat to be blocked, rather than a channel to be earned, left the traffic on the table.

The lesson

Describe and host your images as if the source page is what matters — because Google keeps deciding that it is. Image search rewards the same discipline as the rest of SEO: a clear, well-described image on a good, crawlable page, with licensing metadata where the image has commercial value. The button that let users skip your site is gone; the badge that credits your work exists. Both changes point the same way — toward the creator who makes the genuine asset legible to the machine. That is not a trick you can copy; it is a standard you can meet.

Discussion questions

The 2018 removal of "View Image" made it harder for users to grab an image without visiting the source. Was that a worse product for searchers, a better deal for publishers, or both at once? Argue it, and connect your answer to the "aligned incentives" idea from Chapter 1.
Google added image-licensing metadata support in 2020 but has never promised it will rank your images higher. Draft one honest sentence you would tell a photographer client about what the "Licensable" badge does and does not do.
This case shows Google re-tuning image search twice, unilaterally. How should that shape the weight you put on any image-search tactic in a long-term strategy? Tie it to the diversification theme (Chapter 6, Chapter 36).
A stakeholder says, "Since Google reads IPTC licensing metadata, let's also stuff our target keywords into the EXIF fields." Using §11.1 and this case, explain why the first idea is sound and the second is folklore.
The chapter argues image SEO and web SEO have converged. Find one way image search is still different from web search — a place where the technique genuinely diverges — and defend it.