How do I remove images from "Google search"?
Images are shown in google search because they are, or have been, shared "Public" in picasaweb. So the first step is to change the album privacy of the images you want to remove from "google search" to any level but "Public". If you don't know how to do this, have a look here: http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=113516.
You'll notice that the images won't disappear from "google search" instantly... Like any search engine, "google search" crawls around the entire internet with a frequency of every few weeks up to once a month to make the information up-to-date and refresh the cache (or copy) it keeps of all information. So normally it will take about a month before your images will disappear...
However, if it is important to you to speed this up, there is a procedure to tell google that there has been an important change, and then they will process these typically the next day. To do this you need to specify the correct URL of each image in the "removal tool".
Because it is not always trivial to get the correct URL to use in the removal tool, follow this procedure to find it:
- search for the image(s) using "google search"/"Images"
- for each image you want to remove:
- click on the image thumbnail shown
- if the image is shown properly:
- press "right-click" on the image and choose "Copy Image-URL", "Copy shortcut" of "Copy image location" depending on the browser used.
- if the image isn't shown properly:
- go back to the result list with image thumbnails
- press "right-click" on the thumbnail and choose "Copy shortcut address", "Copy shortcut" of "Copy shortcut location" depending on the browser used.
- open any tekst document, or whatever, where you can do "right-click"/"Paste"... and you'll see a link similar to this one:
- http://www.google.be/imgres?hl=nl&gbv=2&biw=1304&bih=707&tbm=isch&tbnid=RwFy6BV8mZK4BM: &imgrefurl=http://picasaweb.google.com/105440861851754786878&docid=bmUsrNLSQ07SVM&itg=1
- &imgurl=http://lh5.ggpht.com/-Vo10xmyreoA/TfEnrWVuqKI/AAAAAAAAAAA/QUWZtk1Ttw8/0.jpg
- &w=1600&h=950&ei=0mmqToeMCYegOtyYkNoP&zoom=1
- the piece you need is the one that's highlighted in yellow above: between "&imgurl=" and the next "&"
- copy that piece (select it and do "right-click"/"copy" or CTRL+C)...
- go to googles removal tool: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals?hl=nl&pli=1
- choose "New removal request"
- paste the link you just found ("right-click"/"Paste" or press CTRL+V)
- the link should look like this:
- http://lh5.ggpht.com/-WJWxrZ-Jycc/TMwCB7-e4VE/AAAAAAAALds/ucCz6X13PfM/PabloWebalbum.jpg
- press "Continue"
- choose as reason: "Page has been removed or blocked from search engines" and press "Remove this page"
- about a day later it should be OK...