Google Images is currently testing a new “Licensable” badge on images as a way to help photographers sell their photos from google search results (and hopefully, help reduce the chance of copyright infringement & image thefts in the process)!

The “Licensable” label, which had started beta-testing back in February, provides information on the photographer who captured the image and where/how you can license the image should you want too.

Petapixel reports this is another step in a process “after Getty Images lodged “anti-competitive” complaints against it in the US and EU back in February 2018, Google began working with the stock agency to make changes to Google Images that would help protect photographers’ copyright. Days later, it removed the “View Image” button that allowed anyone to download full-res versions of photos while bypassing the host webpage. In September 2018, Google added image rights metadata to photo search results to make it clear who the owner of a photo is.”

According to the Google Images’ developers site,

“When you specify license information for the images on your website, the image can display with a Licensable badge on image thumbnails in Google Images. This tells people that license information is available for the image, and provides a link to the license in the Image Viewer, which offers more detail on how someone can use the image.”

While this new feature isn’t fully available yet, Google is already letting anyone provide the licensing info for their photos through the metadata or structured data as detailed here in preparation for this full-blown launch. So if you’d like your photos to display the Licensable badge in Google Images when the feature is made available, make sure you provide the proper licensing data for the Googlebot web crawler to see by checking the instructions from google linked just above.

This is pretty massive for image licensing sites like Photoshelter and individuals alike seeing as how Google images are a massive global tool used to find images, potentially making it easier for small independent freelancers to reach a much larger market. We don’t have an official date for this to be completely released yet, but I know that me personally, I’ve already started redoing the images on my site and business in preparation for the full launch. What about you? Are you prepared for this service to go live? Will you actually take part and change the way you prepare and upload your images to the internet? Let us know in the comments below.