How to change an image to make it original. Making someone else's image unique

I know a lot of bloggers face this problem. Unique pictures are one of the unspoken requirements search engines, which is announced ahead of time.

We all know very well what awaits any blog that posts copied content. Pictures and images are also an integral part of the content (the second most important for search engines). Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, Internet resources are not punished for copying media content. But how long until the introduction of new algorithms that will lower the rankings of sites and blogs with non-unique images?

On at the moment The requirements of search engines are quite simple - “if you use someone else’s pictures, please put a link to the author of the image or to the original.” Which contradicts the very rules of search engines. Imagine an article in which there are not two, not three, but several dozen images, and all of them are borrowed. Such a number of links, even closed in nofollow, can involuntarily lead to some filters.

What to do in such a situation? You can, of course, turn to freelancers or stock photo banks to purchase unique images. But to a novice blogger, such costs may seem simply incredible, and even a biased waste of the budget. I'd like to in this case proposed a method that will allow you to get unique pictures from non-unique ones, but it’s difficult to call it simple.

And in order to understand what search engines consider unique images, we will turn to the help of Yandex. Oddly enough, it was Yandex that was ahead of the more advanced Google in the development of image recognition and comparison algorithms. So…

How to make a picture unique

I will not rewrite the Yandex instructions. But it’s still worth saying a few words about the fact that methods such as rotation, sepia, filters, cropping or additional image the form of frames has not worked for a long time.

It also tells the basic principles of identifying duplicates; these principles told me how to make a unique one from a non-unique image.

Let's figure out what this algorithm is based on. The principle that Yandex talks about works on color signatures. That is, every pixel of the image, or rather the color that is embedded in it, is involved in identifying duplicates. Unfortunately, this algorithm is imperfect and very easy to bypass.

As I already said, Yandex is far behind Google in development of this algorithm. And it is best to check the uniqueness of the image in it.

For the experiment, I selected images from a more recent Yandex article on image recognition. And here is the original:

As it turns out, making a picture unique is quite simple, since the search algorithm is based on colors; you just need to exclude all colors.

Unfortunately, such an image is unlikely to attract your readers, so this method I would rule it out.

The second way to uniqueize an image is to use filters. As you can see, Google doesn't find of this image on the Internet, Yandex found the original without any problems.

The third step, I decided to slightly change the image in the hope of mixing up the signatures: I cut down one of the trees and turned the house over. Both Google and Yandex found the original. (rotations, minor changes, image overlay and text are duplicates)

The last thing I could do was start changing colors. In the first picture I replaced 40% of the color (sky) - search engines found the image.

The second image has about 50% change, which was enough percentage for Google to not find the original image. Yandex referenced the original source without any problems.

I added and added colors until I came to the desired result. 85% of the changes turned out to be sufficient for Yandex to consider the image unique.

We draw conclusions: isn’t it time to start studying graphic editors? 85% of changes are equivalent to drawn new picture. So perhaps it’s much easier to create your own illustrations and pictures for articles than to spend so much time editing and combining others’ ones?

Uniqueness of content (text and graphic) – prerequisite For normal operation website and its adequate ranking in search engines. And if dozens of publications have already been written on our resource about the intricacies of working with texts, we have not yet talked about how to work with graphics correctly. It's time to correct this gap.

In fact, the answer to the question of how to make a picture unique for search engines is much simpler than the answer to a similar question about text. In any case, this is the case for now. Uniqueness of the text is a complex creative and technical process that requires knowledge of the language and is honed over the years. And even a middle school student can make a picture unique for search engines - without special problems. But we will still tell you about it - for those who have no experience of such work at all.

Why do you need unique images on your website?

As already mentioned, if you use non-unique content, your site will be blocked by all search engines. The search engine will quickly figure out that you simply appropriated the picture, and to begin with, it will simply give you a “minus”. If the amount of non-unique material is repeated, and there are no links to the original source of the content, then they will simply stop ranking you and give you the status of a site that is not interesting to users.

The answer is banal, but accurate - only unique content works in the 21st century. But it’s real to create unique images not always feasible. Therefore, we will solve the issue using available means.

What affects and what does not affect the uniqueness of a picture?

The uniqueness of an image is no longer affected in any way by cropping it both in length and width - if this does not deform the image. That is, the search engine is able to analyze the image pixel by pixel, point by point, and determine that it is a piece of another image that does not belong to you. It can also be said with a high degree of probability that the search engine will identify as a non-unique image that is a vertical or horizontal reflection of the source - again, if no other manipulations have been carried out.

And here’s what is suitable now and will be suitable in the foreseeable future when uniqueizing an image for search engines:

Changing brightness, saturation and contrast will make the picture unique;
Color balance adjustment;
Using watermarks or other text over the image that are barely visible to the eye;
Montage or collage of several images;
And some similar manipulations.

All this is quite simple and quickly will allow you to make a picture for the site unique.

How to make a unique picture: simple steps

The most in a simple way make the picture unique for the site and for search engines - use a graphic editor. And it’s not at all necessary professional photoshop, maybe some much more simple tools, excluding only the built-in Windows editor Paint. Nowadays you can even find sites that offer to make a picture unique online. But we will focus on normal editors and take Photoshop as an example.

So, you need a photo of a tree broken by a thunderstorm. You go to Yandex or Google, select “image search” there and enter “broken tree”, “tree broken by the wind” or whatever you like. You will immediately be offered an incredible number of options for crumpled trees. For example, like this:

Download the image to your computer and open it in Photoshop. First of all, we look at the size of the picture and, if necessary, make it a little smaller or larger. To do this in top menu select the “Image” item, and in it - “Image size”:

Please note: if in this window you uncheck the “Maintain proportions” checkbox at the bottom left and change the width and height from 800 by 600 pixels to, for example, 808 by 595 pixels, then the picture will already pass the first stage of uniqueization, since it is deformed and will no longer coincide pixel-by-pixel with the source. But to be sure, I recommend playing around with other parameters - for example, with color balance or brightness and contrast located lower in the menu:

You can also go to the “Filters” menu and select the “Sharpness” filter there. In general, for a beginner this game will be even fun, especially with filters. By the way, if you do something wrong, you can always undo last action, pressing simultaneously Ctrl keys and Z. Oh, well, it wouldn’t hurt to flip horizontally - to do this, go again to the “Image” menu, and then “Rotate Canvas”.

Online publications are rapidly gaining popularity, and photography also requires understanding “ search engine optimization» ( Search Engine Optimization - SEO). This is the case if you hope to attract an audience who will please you with their attention after you click on the “publish” button.

If you write own blog or are responsible for the content of any website, then SEO should top your list of priorities. Most people already understand the idea and importance keywords in web content. The main function of a search engine is to match your site to user queries in order of relevance. This task is performed, in part, based on keywords and text on the site.

You may rely on a fantastic post title, but it won't be enough to drive traffic to your site if the language doesn't match the typical search engine. Sensational headlines may attract print readers, but only a headline with effective SEO optimization attracts readers to the web resource. If we called this article “Find a needle in a haystack”, it would never reach its target audience.

We're talking about photographers here, so making sure our copy is SEO-optimized is only half the battle. We want people to read our blogs and find our professional websites, and we want people to find our photos. Think about the millions of websites on the Internet. SEO choices help search engines like Google understand what exactly is on the site. And we hope to rank above the competition in search results. Therefore, photographers should pay attention to the titles of their images.

Search engines primarily work with text and links. Making differences between photographs is not easy, but it is possible. Remember how in last time You searched for images on Google, and something completely unrelated to the search popped up in the results. Most likely, this is due to the unfortunate name of the image. Since the title may only contain words related to the image, it is important to give it a name that is optimized for search engines. For example, there is absolutely nothing unique about IMG_2468.jpg, and chances are there are many other images with the same ineffective title. When you think about how many searches are made on the Internet every day, and how many of them are for images, you will try your best to make sure that they find you and not someone else.

It's not an exact science, but there are proven steps you can take to help your images get the attention they deserve. And at the same time, drive traffic to your site, which will hopefully lead to growth in your business.

What's in a name?

As already noted, we are not friends with names like DSC_0042.jpg. This, unfortunately, is not the case when less is more. When it comes to optimizing your photos for the web, the more the merrier. You should give every image on your site unique name, which is specific to its intended use. "DSC_0042.jpg" tells the search engine nothing about the content of the photo. The photo should be named so that the search engine knows who took the photo, what is depicted and where it can be found on the Internet. Suddenly, a simple cookbook photo was no longer “DSC_0042.jpg.” Now it's identified as "geyer-photography-atlanta-food-photographer-polenta-recipe" or something like that. Even by rearranging words you can influence the result. Choose your words and their order carefully.

Separating words: hyphen, fraction, dash, underscore

By separating words, you help the search engine understand what you are trying to say. Obviously we enter search query words with spaces between them. But the problem is that search engines don't know what to do with spaces, so they close them. This is why things like URLs and image titles (which are associated with the URL) need to be written with a dash/hyphen between words. Thus, “photos of food” will still be “photos of food”, not photographs of food.

Until last year, there was ongoing debate about whether a dash or a hyphen is preferable. In 2012, Google finally answered this question by stating that their search engines consider emphasized space, turning "food_photos" into non-spatial "food_photos". Although it does not have a huge impact on search results. This seems to be one of the few SEO debates about what is right and what is wrong.

Alt text of images

Websites on WordPress and other platforms allow you to insert Alt text into photos. You should use this field to add keywords using visual editor. This will help your images rank high when people search for those words or phrases.

Discussion of photos on the page where they appear

Search engines extract data not only from the image URL, but also from the surrounding text. Therefore, you can increase the chances of images on your site being popular and leading to higher search rankings. If you blog about your photos, comment on them, adding more searchable information than a typical image gallery that doesn't have any accompanying text.

Size matters

This is one of those areas where bigger is better. The enlarged image has more high rating in search engines than miniature. You need to be clear about how your site displays images. Also, take full advantage of your site's ability to display images at their best if you want to make sure you're doing everything you can to promote your photography.

Remember about social networks

Your presence in social networks should be a natural extension of your website. Some users will sit down at the computer and start looking for a photographer, for example, through the Facebook search engine. Of course, many people start their search in social platforms from viewing the photographer’s page, and then go to his website. Not only should you discuss your photos on social media, but you should also include links to the original images on your website.

Changes at Google

In January this Google of the Year changed the way images are displayed in search results. We suddenly went from miniatures to low resolution to crisp, high-quality thumbnails. Gone are those embedded links that automatically launched image owner pages, offering the best for both photographers and the people searching for them. In an attempt to make things easier for the person searching for something, clicking on an image search result opens a second window that gives the choice of whether to go to the full site. While this may make the search easier for people looking for images, it does provide another argument for photographers to take care of. proper optimization images for search engine. If you don't do this, then potential client may never get to the main site.

Hello, dear lovers of working with images.

We continue to improve our images and this will be the fourth article on this subject.

Now we’ll talk about how to make a picture unique, and we’ll also look at the concept of uniqueness itself in order to understand why you need to do it at all. I will also note that this article will be in the form of an experiment, that is, I will take a picture right now and check the most popular methods on her. All data is not taken out of thin air!

I provided links to the first 3 articles on images at the end of the article in order to immediately move on to the consideration of the above issues. In the article I described everything in great detail in the form of an experiment. I recommend that you study everything, and first I give you a short video lesson with the process of checking a picture for uniqueness, as well as in effective ways its increase.

What is a unique picture and why is it needed?

The concept of uniqueness of an image can be viewed from 2 angles:

The concept of uniqueness, as uniqueness, that is, there is only one such picture and no one else has it. These include personal photographs or designer graphics, as an option;
The second point concerns the definition of uniqueness from the point of view of the perception of search engines. If you run your own website and use pictures there that you take from the Internet, then be sure that your images are not unique. And search engines see this. We'll look at how this could work out for you later.

Based on these 2 factors, 2 obvious conclusions can be drawn:

It is necessary to make the images unique, that is, the only one. To do this, either make pictures yourself (if you are fluent in graphic editors) or order them from professionals. You can also take your own photographs if your field of activity allows it;
If you take images from the Internet, you need to transform (change) them so that search engines do not consider them non-unique. This is very easy to do, which we will consider in the third paragraph of the article. It is enough to do 1-2 steps and the problem is solved.

Regarding the first point, if you take your own photos and screenshots, you don’t have to worry. Such a picture will, by definition, be unique. But if you want to make an existing picture unique, then you need to suffer. It is necessary to either change its contents or give it a personal design.

Many bloggers resort to this option when writing articles on certain topics. They create a kind of frame for the main image of the article and place graphics downloaded from the Internet inside it. Thus, the images seem to be the same, but served with a different sauce. Here are just a few examples of such processing.

As you can see, in essence, these images are identical in structure. Only the frame has been changed, inside of which there are images from the Internet located on hundreds of thousands of sites.

Bloggers make such images in order to somehow stand out from the rest of the crowd. Some people succeed, some don't. As you can see from the pictures above, in fact only the colors and some small points (colors, size, frame) have been changed. But there is no uniqueness as such.

Therefore, think carefully when you are going to copy someone, but change the original version. Will this work to your advantage?

Now let's move on to the second point, which assumes the uniqueness of the image in search engines. We will talk about how to check this moment in 1 minute.

If we take the images provided above, then they may not be unique in the opinion of search engines, since Yandex and Google recognize images perfectly, even if they are placed in some kind of frame. We can verify this further.

That is, if I take a picture and place it in another picture, then after checking the search engines will still give a result in the form of non-uniqueness and show similar results on the Internet exactly in the form of the picture that was inserted into the frame.

Therefore, uniqueizing an image in the first way does not make it unique in the opinion of search engines. But you should not be afraid of this, since non-unique images will not harm your site. To be honest, I haven’t researched this at this point, but I trusted the words of experts in this field.

Such images will only rank poorly among other images, which will affect the traffic that can be received from image searches. That is, if we constantly devote time to uniqueness of pictures, then ultimately we can count on their high positions in image searches and receive a certain amount visitors to the site.

It's up to you to take advantage of this moment! Now let's see how this happens in practice.

Checking the image for uniqueness

To check we will use the service tineye, as well as image search from google ( images.google.com).

As an example, I found an image on the Internet that I will use as a thumbnail for this article.

Moreover, this is not just a picture. This is a cut out icon from a shared image where there were many icons. In theory, it should be unique. But what will happen in practice?

Let's go to the first service first tineye and immediately upload this picture by clicking on the “Select file” button.

After selecting a file on your computer, the scan will begin immediately, as indicated by the download icon in right side(highlighted with a blue frame).

After the check is completed, it will display the result. Surprisingly, it showed only 7 matches this service and showed similar options that, according to the service, are identical.

Now let's check the image through the Google image search service. Let's move on via this link and click on the camera icon.

According to Google, my image appears as many as 57 times on other resources.

In fact, these results are good, since if I took another picture (not cut out), I would get an option not in tens, but in hundreds or even hundreds of thousands.

Now let's talk about ways to make a picture unique.

Making the picture unique

If you read other articles on this topic, you will see many options on how to make an image unique. But from my practice, I have identified only one option that really always works. and does not require the creation of any frames or sketches.

In fact, here's what you can do to try to achieve uniqueness.

Adding third-party elements to an image;
Placing an image inside another (see above);
Overlaying text inside a picture;
Image transformation (resizing, displaying along the X and Y axes, rotations).

What do you think works and what doesn't? All methods that do not change the location of the main elements in the image itself, its contours, and so on, do not work. That is, the first 3 methods do not work when we try to add something to the image (other pictures, signature, watermark, text).

Of course, it is impossible to say that they do not work at all, since they may help to reduce the number of results found during verification. But we strive for an ideal result, when the picture is 100% unique?

If so, then indeed effective methods are actions that change the position of the image as a whole and its main elements. These include:

resizing;
display horizontally and vertically;
turns in different directions.

Let's experiment.

I always make all my thumbnails for posts from a frame into which I always insert the image I found. My frame is simple. It just has a background light color, from which the frame is ultimately obtained. There is also a shadow offset towards the bottom right edge.

Now inside this frame I will place the image that I found earlier. The following happened.

The results after verification decreased, but 100% uniqueness was not achieved (tineye - 5, google - 41).

Now let's try to put text on top and check if it does anything. Yes, there is a result, but here’s what’s worth saying.

100% uniqueness is achieved in both services only in the case complete overlap text of the main content of the image. That is, if you simply put text somewhere to the side, the effect will not be complete. But if you overlay text on the entire image, then there is an option that the picture will become unique.

The result is excellent, but we had to sacrifice the readability of the image. We don't need this. Therefore, if this cannot be done in your picture, this method can be discarded.

Now let's try the remaining options with changing the display of the picture. Let's start by enlarging the image. Having increased it a little, I did not get the desired effect, and even worse according to google- 100 results. This is due to the fact that there are already a lot of variants of this picture on the Internet and, apparently, it is on this scale that it appears more times than before.

Having tried to reduce the image, I already got more results (tineye - 0, google - 31).

From these experiments we can conclude that the method does exist, but in some cases it is very difficult to implement. If the picture is very common, then there are many options for its size on the Internet and it is difficult to achieve uniqueness.

So, the next thing we have to do is check the image transformation and its rotation. Let's start with the first one. I displayed it horizontally and after checking I received a consoling verdict in the form of zero repetitions.

IN google situation the same! I didn’t give a screenshot because Google doesn’t write anything if there are no results. There's emptiness there.

What conclusions can be drawn from the experiments performed above? Let's summarize this article.

Placing an image inside other images, as many bloggers do, does not work;
Text overlay works, but only partially. Once complete uniqueness is achieved, the image may not be readable;
Resizing also works partially. It all depends on the prevalence of the image on the Internet. The more variations there are, the more difficult it is to achieve uniqueness this way;
Horizontal and vertical display works 100%;
Rotation works 100%.

The last 2 methods may not work. Again, it all depends on whether someone has done this before you.

Knowing these findings, I can make the final thumbnail for this post. And here's what I'll do:

I will enlarge the picture so that it fits completely into my frame;
I'll turn it a little to the right.

There is no need to do anything else. No text and so on. This is what happened.

Uniqueness - 100%. No matches found.

This is where I will end the article. An unusual format has been released! I hope you liked it. Not some empty words, but real arguments and experiments in real time.

Before I forget! If you know any other ways to make a picture unique, please comment below.

That's it, friends, see you in new materials. Bye.

Best regards, Konstantin Khmelev!

It is known that you need to place only unique content on your website in order for your blog to have a chance of normal promotion in search engines. And this applies not only to text, but also to images. If everything is extremely clear with the text, i.e. we take and write our articles and materials from our own heads, without copying information from the Internet. Well, either we rewrite other people’s articles, i.e. rewriting them in your own words, adding your thoughts.

But with pictures everything is much more complicated. If you simply take a picture from the Internet and insert it into your website, it will not be unique and any search engine will see it. In some cases, you can take the necessary photographs yourself, if this is possible and fits the format of the article. Then, of course, your pictures in the form of photographs in the article will be unique. But very often an article needs such pictures that it is impossible to take and photograph it. Well, for example, the cover of a game or some program needs to be placed... But you just don’t have this at hand, why don’t you go buy the game or take a photo in the store? :) Draw it yourself from scratch in Photoshop?? This, I think, is an unreasonable waste of time :)

In such cases, the simplest option is to take a picture suitable for our task from the Internet and bring it to a unique form in graphic editor, for example, in Photoshop.

About how to search required images on the Internet with different parameters, described in a separate article,

In this article I will talk in detail about how you can make any image unique for search engines and how to check images for uniqueness...

How to check a picture for uniqueness

You can check the uniqueness of an image directly through the most popular search engines: Google and Yandex.

Below I will consider checking uniqueness for Google example, because this is quite enough. Yandex is similar in principle to this.

Opening Google page and there select the “Pictures” section:

Click on the button with the image of the camera in the search bar.

Now we can upload an image from a computer for verification or provide a link if this image is on any site on the Internet.

In case you want to check an image file from your computer, go to the “Upload File” tab and drag an image from your computer into the window (or select it through Explorer by clicking “Browse”).

If the image, for example, is already on your website (or some other), then you can check it on Google using the link. To do this, go to the “Specify link” tab:

Right-click on the image you want to check and select “Copy image link” from the drop-down list:

IN Google result will display the number of copies found on the Internet. If there are about 10 copies, this is already quite good, we can say that the image is almost unique. You just need to adjust the image a little and it will be unique. Ideally, the result should be 1-3 copies and this will mean that the image is definitely unique. If the result produced thousands, millions, billions of matches, then the picture is definitely not unique and is repeated everywhere you go :)

An example of a unique image. A total of approximately 3 matches were found:

And here is an example of a non-unique image, for which billions of matches were found:

Making the picture unique

On this point, it is impossible to give 100% clear instructions, so that all that remains is to take and repeat the actions. Therefore, for each found image they can be applied different ways giving it uniqueness from those presented below or one of them. For some images it works and it will be preferable in terms of picture quality to use one of the methods, for another picture some other method, and for some, several techniques need to be used at once.

All image manipulations can be easily done in the program Adobe Photoshop. And even necessary! :) Because, as a rule, it is done easier there than in any analogues.

All examples of image processing to make them unique, shown below, will be done in Adobe Photoshop.

How to open the desired image editing options

All editing methods shown in the examples below are performed through the menu “Editing” - “Transformation”:

Or you need to left-click on the image so that “corners” appear for editing it. Then you need to left-click on one of the corners and again there right click mice. As a result, a list of actions on the image will appear, some of which we will use to make it unique (see below).

Ways to make an image unique with examples

The main working ways to make an image unique for search engines:

Each image needs its own approach so that it looks good and is, so to speak, on topic.

If we take the example with distortion that was discussed above, then the image can still be left as is, but if we take the examples above with rotating the image and changing the perspective, then the image ultimately looks somehow completely ugly... In such cases it is better to use several ways of uniqueness immediately, rather than, for example, just rotating it by a very large degree, which completely spoils the appearance of the image. Or come up with something else...

If we take the example of rotating an image, then you can make something like a collage from several images similar in theme, if this is at all possible according to your idea for the theme of the image being prepared. Example:

It would be better that way.

Or take the considered example with a change in perspective, which is done very strongly to give the image uniqueness, which also noticeably spoils the appearance of the image. Here it would be possible, as an option, to make the perspective smaller and apply further deformation (stretching, narrowing, twisting different points of the picture). Example:

For some images, it will be enough to rotate them a little and, for example, slightly deform them. For others, rotate a little and change the perspective a little. Again, it all depends on the image and how popular it is on the Internet (the more popular it is, the more difficult it is to make it more unique). Well, it also depends on which method makes sense to apply to the image, and which one will only greatly worsen its appearance.

And you should also know that sometimes, applying additional effects, such as shadows, will make the image again non-unique if it was unique without the shadow. Don't forget to constantly check the image via Google or Yandex!

Conclusion

As you already understand, there are only a few basic ways to quickly edit an image to make it unique to search engines. The editing process itself is simple, but sometimes making the final image look good not an easy task. Here you already need experience working with different types images on different topic, because with experience you will get better and better!