Structured Data

Image Schema

Structured data describing an image — its licence, creator and caption — using ImageObject.

Image schema is schema.org's ImageObject markup, describing an image's URL, caption, creator and licence. Its most practical use is licensing: Google Images can show a licence badge and a link to your terms, which is how a photographer or stock library turns image traffic into attribution or a sale.

Definition

ImageObject describes a picture rather than the page containing it: contentUrl, caption, creator, and for licensing, license and acquireLicensePage.

Google supports a licensable-images feature driven by exactly these fields. Without them an image is just an image; with them, the result can carry a licence indicator and a route to buy or attribute.

Why It Matters

For anyone whose images have commercial value, this is the difference between images being taken and images being licensed. For everyone else it is a modest way to give search engines more certainty about the image's subject.

Example

{
  "@type": "ImageObject",
  "contentUrl": "https://example.com/photo.jpg",
  "license": "https://example.com/terms",
  "creator": {"@type": "Person", "name": "A. Photographer"}
}

The licensing case is the one worth the effort

For most sites, ImageObject markup adds marginal value: search engines can already tell what a page's images are from context and alt text.

The exception is anyone whose images have commercial value. Google supports a licensable-images treatment driven by two specific fields — license, pointing at your terms, and acquireLicensePage, pointing at where someone can buy or request permission. With them, an image result can carry a licence indicator and a route to obtain rights.

Without them, an image that ranks well in Google Images is traffic you cannot convert and, frequently, use you cannot control. The markup is the difference between images being taken and images being licensed.

How SlapMyWeb checks this

The audit parses every JSON-LD block and validates each declared type, so an ImageObject missing contentUrl or carrying a licence URL that does not resolve is reported with the field named. It also checks that images referenced in markup are the images actually on the page — a mismatch is the most common reason licensable-image features do not appear.

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