Best way to get into Google images?

wumpus

I'm working on a ZP gallery and want my images indexed by Google Images and the other search engine image bots. Is there a best setting to allow this? Do I simply make the images unprotected? Do I make the full image force a download?

gwmbox

First rule - don't try and SPAM google - you WILL fail.

Second rule, give your images a title AND alt text and make them descriptive of the image and remember the first rule.

Go back to first rule - don't spam, don't over use words unless you DON'T want to be indexed

Google will find you (eventually) and will index the images accordingly (if appropriate description is provided) - be patient

fns

How do you add alt-text to a Zen album image?

wumpus

@gwmbox, are you saying making the images downloadable vs protected doesn't matter to Google? I always thought Google images wanted the complete URL to the image.

Thanks for reminding me about alt and title. My image file names will be fairly descriptive so perhaps I'll just dynamically render the alt and title using the file name (but removing the dashes that are in my file names).

I hope they don't consider this spam because with my gallery I have four to six images of each item from different angles, like green-widget-1a.jpg, green-widget-1b.jpg so I guess that could look pretty spammy in Google images after a few hundred.

Perhaps I could figure out how to code it so that only the first image in each set contained an alt and title (based on the -1x.jpg in the file name)?

acrylian

Actually the standard themes already fill the alt tags and title tags for images and links. You might also want to take a look at the google sitemap additon on our extensions page.

wumpus

Thanks, I noticed that last night when I went back. What I started doing was trying to code it to strip the dashes and underscores from my file names and also capitalize them so they looked much more user friendly on the title and alt. I managed to pull it off on an album but not being much of a coder, I started getting in over my head as it appears the title and alt tags are pulled differently on the album page, the image page and the full image. Plus it was 12 AM.

When I have more time maybe I'll try to make a function that I can call to do it in every instance.

UPDATE: I'm researching how Google Images indexes sites by finding sites with "Powered by zenPHOTO" and then searching those in Google Images by searching 'site:<sitename>'. This looks very instructive...

nothingless

wumpus, would you be willing to share the code for how you did this on the album.php page? I'd love to know and am not having much luck trying to figure it out myself!

wumpus

nothingless, I'm a newbie coder but maybe this snippet will get you started. I added a simple function to the top of my themeoptions.php file like so:

`

function purtyTitle($fname)

{

$output = preg_replace("/[^a-z \d]/i", " ", $fname);

return ucwords($output);

}`

Then I started changing the album.php calls to titles like so:
`

<?php echo purtyTitle(getImageTitle());?>

`

This sends the getImageTitle results to my function and strips out underscores and dashes from my titles, replacing them with spaces. The ucwords then capitalizes the results before returning them. I'm using the default theme as my basis if that matters.