Google to add support for higher quality images in search, swipe up images & 3D images

Google announced in the State of Search session at Google I/O Thursday, that it will be launching higher quality image support, 3D images and the ability to swipe up images from AMP pages.

We already covered the 3D images from Google’s keynote Wednesday, and we already saw Google testing swipe navigation with AMP articles. Here are more details about these three new features that should be going live in Google image search in the future.

High-resolution images. Google said that a new program to submit higher resolution images to Google Image search is coming soon. Websites will be able to opt-in images to this program. It is unclear how to opt in, but Google said to watch the Google Webmaster blog for the announcement, and of course, we will update you here on Search Engine Land when Google does announce it.

Here is the slide introducing the high resolution program:

Google also showed the markup it may use for this, although, this is not yet fully released, so it probably won’t do anything if you implement it now:

3D images. We covered the 3D images news yesterday, but here Google has showed us the markup that it may use for you to communicate pages that have embedded these 3D images. Again, this is currently in beta and has not been released to the wider webmaster community, but in case you are curious, here is that slide:

Swipe up to navigate. A couple months ago, we spotted Google testing a funky feature where you can swipe up up from an image search result to see the AMP article associated with that image. Well, Google has discussed that this is coming soon and will be a feature through image search for users to find AMP pages related to that image.

Here is Google’s slide about this:

Here is how it functions:

Showing preview of #AMP pages over Google Image results is something new?@rustybrick pic.twitter.com/ElVXYArLkQ

— Jose Varghese (@IamJoseVarghese) March 23, 2019

Why we care. Over the past several months, Google has been dropping hints that image search is something SEOs, webmasters, developers and content producers should pay attention to. It is a good way for searchers to discover new content and information and can be helpful in not just driving eye-balls but potentially even conversions. Some of these new features may help with those efforts. Keep them on your radar.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.