[METHOD] Image Spinning

As most of you are aware, you can now drop an Image into Google Image search and it will show you visually similar images.

Of course this leads to the fact that Google know whether or not you are using images taken from somewhere else, or if they're actually unique.

Whether this has any SEO impact right now is still unknown. I prefer to 'spin' my images, because I feel that it will be good for long-term stability should Google ever place any weight on Unique Images (if it hasn't done so already).

What this can be used for:
I came up with this method because I make sites that have many articles dripped. So because I'm spinning a batch of articles, I figured why not give them all unique images to go with them and make it appear as unique and natural as possible.

Known Issues:
If you blindly do this and don't look at the output, it may look a bit dodgy to a manual review. In 90%+ of cases you're fine. Much like text spinning, the more you spin it, the higher chance it'll look like crap.

Required Software:
- Scrapebox (used for grabbing tonnes of images, not 100% necessary if you can get images another way)
- Photoshop

How to do it:
Grabbing the images:
- Load up Scrapebox, and install the Addon called "Google Image Grabber". (If you don't have SB, obtain your images another way, and place them all in a folder together).
- Add in the keywords you want images of. Be specific, i.e. for Real Estate put "Houses" and "Family Home" .etc.
- Run it. The number of Images per KW will depend on how many you require. Make sure you choose an empty target folder, and enable over-write to ensure you don't get duplicates. Choose Medium for your image size in most case.
- Once you've downloaded the images, go to "View Images"
- Delete any that are unsuitable or appear to be duplicates (I'll have more on this later)

Photoshopping them:
- In photoshop, go to Window > Actions.
- Open up your first image.
- Hit the "New Action" button in the Actions window.
- Hit the little "Record" button in Photoshop
- Using the "Marquee Tool", select the entire image.
- Right-Click, and hit "Transform", Distort the image minorly by pulling the top right-hand corner up and to the right by around 20% of the height of the image. Press Enter to save the changes.
- Re-select the whole image with the Marquee tool
- Transform > Flip Horizontally.
- Re-select the whole image using the Marquee tool
- Go to Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation
- Hue +10, Saturation +20, Darkness -5, Hit Enter
- Go to Image > Image Size, Untick "Constrain Proportions", change the height to 85%, hit Enter.
- Go to Image > Image Size, Tick "Constrain Proportions", set image width to 400px (or whatever you like)
- Go File > Save for Web, Quality should be 60-80, Jpeg. Save this in a brand new folder, but DO NOT change the file name (it'll end up overwriting during a batch save).
- Hit "Stop" in the Actions Window. You've now made a new Action which can be applied to a whole batch.
- Go to File > Automate > Batch
- Select the Action you just created (PS will prob have already selected it)
- Choose your Source Folder
- Choose Destination Folder (a new folder)
- Errors: Log to File - you don't want to get interrupted just because of some errors, you have better things to do than that!

Renaming:
- A dead-giveaway that an image is a duplicate is the filename. Download a batch renamer like 123renamer. Any will do. Just rename them as 000####.jpg or something, and you'll be fine.

Choosing suitable images:
Here are some tips for when choosing which images to keep and remove in SB before Exporting.
- Choose images with similar proportions. Doesn't need to be that close, but don't pick a really tall image and a really wide image, it might screw up.
- Choose images that don't contain text if you plan on flipping it horizontally.
- Try to avoid watermarked images.
- Check the images after you ran the Batch Automation, to make sure they came out fine.

Modifying the Process:
The parts I've written in Blue font are those which can easily be changed to suit your images better, or be improved upon. These settings worked for me fine, but they won't work for every batch. I used it on around 2000 images of houses - it worked awesome! Feel free to play around with various filters and distortion techniques. Ultimately you want to make it unique while still making sure it looks decent to the human eye.

Any questions, just hit me up!

Such a spinning doesn't guarantee uniqueness, read patent by Podilchuk:
"System and Method for comparing images using an Edit Distance"

This is what Google's algo based upon.

Maybe if we add the acrylic paint effect in photoshop it won't be recognized by this algo... which is comparing blocks of pixels.

lancis said:

Such a spinning doesn't guarantee uniqueness, read patent by Podilchuk:
"System and Method for comparing images using an Edit Distance"

This is what Google's algo based upon.

Click to expand...

This is the equivalent of saying Google effectively detects spun text right now - it does to some degree, but nowhere near well enough.

By changing so many variables, such as the proportions, perspective (via distortion), hue, saturation, orientation and even the quality level (by changing the quality it will interfere with the pixels) I believe its definitely good enough to fool the Big G for a very very long time.

New Thiing : Nice Share

In order to make the image unique you just need to change the metadatas of the images. I don't know if google read that though.

You see duplicated images ranking fine in Google Images.

Quick tip to add to this thread, to quickly make a spinnable form of the images here is the tuts :

Copy the link of the grabbed images.

Paste them in notepad++

CTRL + F

Pick the tab Find and Replace

In the text to find field type this : \n

To replace : |

Hit replace All


Then you do another shot with

In the text to find field type this : \r

To replace : "leave it empty not even a space"

Hit replace All


No you just have to add :

At the beginning

<img src="{

At the end

}" />


And you have a full spinnable image content. Quite useful for Web 2.0 posting.

Yea nice share! Have you tested the Google algorithm by feeding it one of your images and seeing if it can find the original?

Have tested it on heaps, it's finding heaps of similar images, but none that are the original. This is a perfect sign that they end up looking alright, but aren't being detected as duplicates.

One thing I've noticed about Google Algorithm with regards to its image comparator is that it focuses VERY heavily on the hue and brightness of the image. You could have a photo of a bedroom and if its wall is the colour of bricks, it'll turn results of brickwalls .etc.

why not just use paint and cut some of the edges of the photo to make it smaller?

Because without adjusting other variables, Google will still detect it as the same image.

This would also not be an automated process to create a limitless amount of useable images (I've literally created thousands of unique images in one go).

If you want to do this with any level of automation you should not be using Photoshop at all.

Just use something like imagemagick to automate distorting your images.

A good rule of thumb for determining if Google thinks an image is unique would be to put the new image in tineye.com and see if any results results show up. If tineye.com shows other matches for the image, you probably didn't make it different enough.

Great share! I use photoscape to do something similar. It can do all the photos in a folder at once and is free.

Its really a long procedure,rather than using your method .I just type keyword in google images and get the picture i want in seconds