Can you noindex a page, but still index an image on that page?

[WebServiceConsulting.com]

If a blog is centered around visual images, and we have specific pages with high quality content that we plan to index and drive our traffic, but we have many pages with our images...what is the best way to go about getting these images indexed?

We want to noindex all the pages with just images because they are thin content...

Can you noindex,follow a page, but still index the images on that page?

Please explain how to go about this concept.....

[TomRayner]

In theory, this shouldn't be a problem.

When you use an image on a page, you are embedding that image from somewhere else - it's own URL.

Therefore, if the page itself is "noindex,follow" - that does not apply to the images (or anything else like a video, pdf etc) that is embedded into the page.  Provided that the URL holding the image is allowed to be indexed on your root domain, which it will by default, you can index the image.

You can test this out by uploading images to your root domain and then, in the next few days, performing this site search:

site:yoursite.com filetype:jpg (or png/gif/whatever you used)

That will show any of the images that you have on the site that are in the Google index.  If that does not work, try this search:

site:yoursite.com inurl:imagefilename

Replace those details with your real site and what you named the image when uploading and it should show you whether or not it's indexed or not.  If not, you could try sharing the image on Google+. G+ is ridiculously effective at getting web pages and content indexed.

But just because the page where the image is present on is instructed to be noindexed does not mean that the image itself will inherit that quality.  By default, it should be indexed properly.  You can also create image sitemaps to help with indexing (I believe you're running Wordpress, Yoast's SEO wordpress plugin can help with this).

Hope this helps.