Block images from appearing in Google Image Search?

Marketing
1

Is there any way to block images from appearing in Google image search, similarly to the way a page can be blocked using robots.txt or a meta tag? I have a site with a number of high-quality art images that, I can see from my analytics, are getting knocked off all over the world through Google Image Search. I don’t want to deface them with watermarks, and I don’t really love the idea of blanking out the alt tags either, though I know that would probably have the desired effect.

Any ideas?

2

Good find, thanks for posting your solution.

3

Hate to resurrect this thread, but I found the answer to my question and thought others might find it helpful: You can use robots.txt. Not sure why I couldn’t find this the first time around in Google: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35308