ImageObject Schema Markup: Help Google Understand and Display Your Images

It is optional in the sense that Google will still index your images without it. But it is strongly recommended for three reasons: (1) it enables the Licensable badge in Google Image Search, (2) it gives Google machine-readable context about what an image shows — beyond surrounding page text — which improves image search relevance, and (3) AI crawlers use ImageObject metadata to attribute images correctly when generating content. For photographers, news publishers, e-commerce, and any image-heavy site, it is effectively essential.

contentUrl is the direct URL to the image file itself (ending in .jpg, .png, .webp, etc.). This is what Google downloads and visually processes. url is the URL of the webpage that contains or features the image — the human-facing page. Never swap them. If contentUrl points to an HTML page instead of an image file, Google cannot analyse the image and will likely discard the schema.

They serve different purposes and complement each other. An image sitemap helps Google discover that images exist across your site — especially on JavaScript-heavy sites where Googlebot may not see the image URLs. ImageObject schema tells Google what each specific image means, who created it, and what rights it carries. Together they give you maximum image search coverage: sitemap for discovery, JSON-LD for understanding. If you only have bandwidth for one, use ImageObject schema on your most important image pages.

For most pages, add it to the single main/featured image, which you embed as the image property in your Article, Product, or Recipe schema. Adding an independent ImageObject block for every image on a large gallery page creates excessive markup that Google may not process fully. For dedicated photography portfolio pages where the image is the primary content, use a standalone ImageObject block as the main schema type for that page.

After adding the license and acquireLicensePage properties and ensuring Google has crawled and indexed the page, the Licensable badge can take 2–8 weeks to appear in Google Image Search results. You can check whether Google has processed the schema by using the URL Inspection tool in Search Console — look under the Structured Data section of the crawled version. The badge appears as a small "L" overlay on image thumbnails in Image Search.

Yes — both. Google Discover prioritises high-quality images with clear metadata when selecting articles for display. Providing ImageObject with accurate name, description, and creator helps Google understand image relevance for Discover surfacing. For AI Overviews and generative AI products, the creator and license properties are increasingly important: they allow AI systems to correctly attribute images when citing your content, and some AI products use the license property to determine whether an image can be reproduced in generated content.

Alt text and ImageObject description serve related but different purposes. Alt text is a short accessibility label — typically one sentence — used by screen readers. ImageObject description should be a fuller description of what the image depicts, including context that is useful for search. It can be 2-4 sentences. They should be consistent and non-contradictory, but description can and should go further than alt text in explaining the visual content, who took it, and when.

Google will attempt to fetch the contentUrl to process the image. If the URL returns a 404, a redirect to an HTML page, or a MIME type that is not an image, Google will log a crawl error and likely discard the ImageObject schema entirely. The most common mistake is setting contentUrl to the image page URL (an HTML page) rather than the actual image file URL. Always verify contentUrl returns status 200 with a valid image MIME type (image/jpeg, image/png, image/webp).