Keeping images out of Google search results

This article may be outdated and referencing Sunshine Photo Cart 2. Documentation articles are currently being updated and hope to be fully accurate very soon. Apologies for any confusion.

Please know: The moment you put any image online, it can be available to the entire internet. The only true way to protect an image is to never put it online in the first place.

A few Sunshine users have found that client images end up in Google's search results. After digging, we found that the cause was 3rd party SEO plugins including Sunshine related images in XML site maps. An XML site map is a great way to tell Google every URL on your site so Google can find and index. It also has options to include image XML site maps to tell them about every image on your site so it can be included in their image search feature. Sunshine tries to take every precaution to keep images uploaded to password-protected and private galleries secure but when 3rd party plugins take too much liberty with the data there isn't much more Sunshine can do. So it is important to check your SEO plugin settings to make sure it is not overreaching and including your Sunshine gallery images when you don't want to.

Another step is to edit your robots.txt file to tell Googlebot to not index any Sunshine related images. Learn more about this here. Add the following to your robots.txt file:

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /wp-content/uploads/sunshine/*