Google Introduces Licensable Badge for Images using Structured Data (BETA)

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.

This feature isn’t available in Google Images yet. You can provide metadata in advance, to ensure your images are eligible when the feature becomes available.

There are two ways that you can add metadata. You only need to provide Google with one form of metadata to be eligible for the Licensable badge, and any of the following methods is sufficient:

• Structured data: Structured data is an association between the image and the page where it appears with the mark up. You need to add structured data for every instance an image is used, even if it’s the same image.
• IPTC photo metadata: IPTC photo metadata is embedded into the image itself, and the image and metadata can move from page to page while still staying intact. You only need to embed IPTC photo metadata once per image.