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Remove images hosted on your site from search results Trying to remove images of yourself? See Remove your personal information from Google instead. For emergency image removalTo quickly remove images hosted on your site from Google's search results, use the Removals tool. Keep in mind that unless you also remove the images from your site or otherwise block the images as described in the non-emergency image removal section, the images may resurface in Google's search results once the removal request expires.
For non-emergency image removalThere 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.
If you don't have access to the site that's hosting your images (for example a CDN) or your CMS doesn't provide a way to block images with the noindex X-Robots-Tag HTTP header or robots.txt, you might need to delete the images altogether from your site.
To prevent images from your site appearing in Google's search results, add a robots.txt file to the root of the site that hosts the image, for example https://yoursite.example.com/robots.txt. While it takes longer to remove an image from Google's search results using robots.txt rules 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 Removals 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 the dogs.jpg image, we'll see this rule and drop your image from our search results.
Rules may include special characters for more flexibility and control. Specifically, the * character matches any sequence of characters which lets you to match multiple image paths with one rule.
To remove multiple images on your site from Google's 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. For example, # animal-picture-UNICORN.jpg and # animal-picture-SQUIRREL.jpg # in the "images" directory # will be matched by this pattern. Disallow: /images/animal-picture-*.jpg
To remove all the images on your site from our index, place the following rule in your robots.txt file:
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.
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 images 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.
Note that adding the noimageindex robots tag to a particular page will also prevent that images embedded in that page from getting indexed. However, if the same images also appear in other pages, they might get indexed through those pages. To make sure a particular image is blocked no matter where it appears, use the noindex X-Robots-Tag HTTP response header.
See the Google Search help documentation on how to remove an image from search results.
Except as otherwise noted, the content of this page is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License, and code samples are licensed under the Apache 2.0 License. For details, see the Google Developers Site Policies. Java is a registered trademark of Oracle and/or its affiliates.
Last updated 2025-03-06 UTC.
[[["Easy to understand","easyToUnderstand","thumb-up"],["Solved my problem","solvedMyProblem","thumb-up"],["Other","otherUp","thumb-up"]],[["Missing the information I need","missingTheInformationINeed","thumb-down"],["Too complicated / too many steps","tooComplicatedTooManySteps","thumb-down"],["Out of date","outOfDate","thumb-down"],["Samples / code issue","samplesCodeIssue","thumb-down"],["Other","otherDown","thumb-down"]],["Last updated 2025-03-06 UTC."],[[["Remove images from Google Search quickly using the Removals tool for emergencies, but note that images may reappear unless removed from your site or blocked."],["For non-emergency removals, prevent images from appearing in Google Search using robots.txt disallow rules or the `noindex` `X-Robots-Tag` HTTP header, choosing the method best suited for your site."],["Use robots.txt to control which images Google can index by specifying rules for individual images, file types, or all images on your site within the robots.txt file."],["Alternatively, utilize the `noindex` `X-Robots-Tag` HTTP header to remove images from Google Search, ensuring Googlebot can crawl the image URLs to extract the rule."],["Refer to Google Search help documentation for guidance on removing images from properties you don't own."]]],["To remove images from Google Search, use the Removals tool for quick removal, but note images may reappear. For a lasting solution, use `robots.txt` rules or the `noindex` `X-Robots-Tag` HTTP header. `robots.txt` blocks images using file paths or wildcards, and applies to all search engines. The `noindex` header prevents indexing but requires Googlebot to crawl the URLs. For images on others' sites, refer to Google's help documentation.\n"]]
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