Indexing images

Site pages must be indexed before the site images can appear in Yandex Images search results. Information about images is extracted from indexed pages.

Images are downloaded using links from the src attribute of the img tag, as well as from the data-src and data-original attributes (in this case, an image link in the src attribute is optional).

Search results may include any images that the site does not prohibit from indexing in its robots.txt file, as well as images posted on pages that robots.txt does not prohibit from indexing.

Yandex returns images that match the user's query best. The search takes into account various information, including image descriptions. If the images don't have meaningful descriptions, they might not get into the search results. But image description isn't the only ranking factor. This means that there might not be any query words on the pages where the images are found.

Yandex indexes images of standard graphic formats (JPG, PJPG, PNG, GIF, BMP, SVG, PNM, TIFF, and WEBP). Background images and pictures that expand using a script aren't usually indexed. To index hard-to-access content, you can use the Sitemap file.