Remove images hosted on your site from search results
For quick removal, use the Removals tool to remove images hosted on your site from Google's search results within hours.
For non-emergency image removal
There are two ways to remove images from your site from Google's search results:
The two methods have the same effect, choose the method that is more convenient for your site. Keep in mind that Googlebot has to crawl the URLs to extract the HTTP headers, so implementing both methods at the same time doesn't make sense.
Remove images using robots.txt rules
To prevent images from your site appearing in Google's search results, add a robots.txt file to the root of the server that blocks the image. While it takes longer to remove an image from search results than it does to use the Removals tool, it gives you more flexibility and control through the use of wildcards or subpath blocking. It also applies to all search engines, whereas the Remove URLs tool only applies to Google.
For example, if you want Google to exclude the dogs.jpg image that appears on your site at
yoursite.example.com/images/dogs.jpg, add the following to your robots.txt file:
User-agent: Googlebot-Image Disallow: /images/dogs.jpg
The next time Google crawls your site, we'll see this rule and drop your image from our search results.
Rules may include
special characters
for more flexibility and control. The * character matches any sequence of
characters, and patterns may end in $ to indicate the end of a path.
To remove multiple images on your site from our index, add a disallow rule for
each image, or if the images share a common pattern such as a suffix in the filename, use a
the * character in the filename. For example:
User-agent: Googlebot-Image # Repeated 'disallow' rules for each image: Disallow: /images/dogs.jpg Disallow: /images/cats.jpg Disallow: /images/llamas.jpg # Wildcard character in the filename for # images that share a common suffix: Disallow: /images/animal-picture-*.jpg
To remove all the images on your site from our index, place the following robots.txt file in your server root:
User-agent: Googlebot-Image Disallow: /
To remove all files of a specific file type (for example, to include .jpg but not .gif images), you'd use the following robots.txt entry:
User-agent: Googlebot-Image Disallow: /*.gif$
By specifying Googlebot-Image as the User-agent, the images will be
excluded from Google Images. If you would like to exclude the images from all Google searches
(including Google Search and Google Images), specify the Googlebot user
agent.
Remove images with the noindex X-Robots-Tag HTTP header
Alternatively, you can remove images hosted on your site from Google's search results by
adding the noindex X-Robots-Tag to the HTTP response headers of the
image resources you want to remove. In this case you must allow crawling the image URLs in
order for Googlebot to be able to extract the noindex rule. To implement the
noindex X-Robots-Tag HTTP response header,
follow our documentation about noindex.
How do I remove images from properties that I don't own?
See the Google Search help documentation on how to remove an image from search results.