How do you check if press release images are different enough?

[wearehappymedia]

We're helping a Sydney blog called Happy develop their local following and we're starting by ensuring their posts are optimized. They're doing a great job with reviews and content but the one thing we noticed is that all the images they use (because they review music) are from bands and artists that are used tens if not hundreds of times in other places. We're trying to set up a simple way for them to tweak these images to ensure they're crawled and seen as original. Anyone had to deal with this and found a solution that makes sense?

[SEO5Team]

ah , my bad. I would think that any attempt of that sort would constitute a copyright /image licensing infringement.

[wearehappymedia]

Thanks for the reply but I think you misunderstood the question. I was not asking if there's an issue with using press shots but whethere there were tried and tested ways of making that press shot 'original' again and testing that. Say, maing it balck and white or placing text over the top etc.

[SEO5Team]

IMO , while Google does not penalize sites for using stock photographs on multipe domains, it's advisable to follow best practices for image optimization when adding them to your site for the most benefit. Some best practices and Matt Cutt's video link on the same issue below:

Matt Cutts on Stock Images

Image Optimization : Best Practices ( Important points highlighted below)

To help us index your images, make sure that:

• we can crawl both the HTML page the image is embedded in, and the image itself;
• the image is in one of our supported formats: BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, WebP or SVG.

Additionally, we recommend:

• that the image filename is related to the image’s content;
• that the alt attribute of the image describes the image in a human-friendly way;
• and finally, it also helps if the HTML page’s textual contents as well as the text near the image are related to the image.

Q: Should I really submit an Image Sitemap? What are the benefits?
A: Yes! Image Sitemaps help us learn about your new images and may also help us learn what the images are about.

Q: We sometimes see the original source of an image ranked lower than other sources; why is this?
A: Keep in mind that we use the textual content of a page when determining the context of an image. For example, if the original source is a page from an image gallery that has very little text, it can happen that a page with more textual context is chosen to be shown in search. If you feel you've identified very bad search results for a particular query, feel free to use the feedback link below the search results or to share your example in our Webmaster Help Forum.

Here's another useful article:

Image Publishing Guidelines

Cheers,

SEO5..