Googlebot-Image Bot
What is the Googlebot-Image Bot?
From Google we have received an email regarding the Googlebot-Image bot.This is the Google Image crawler that indexes images appearing in Google's image search results. The Googlebot-Image bot thankfully listens to the robots.txt file - normally located in the root of your public website folder.
The Googlebot-Image bot is pretty flexible. Here are some examples.
Allow indexing of a folder
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /
Allow: /path/to/dir/
Remove all images from index
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /image/image.jpg
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /*.jpg$
Disallow: /
Exclude a file from indexing
This will exclude file image.jpg:User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /image/image.jpg
Exclude a file extension like JPG
This will exclude JPG images and include other formats like GIF:User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /*.jpg$
Exclude files from Google Image Search and Google Web Search
If you want to exclude files not only from Google Image Search, but from Google Web Search as well, you have to replace User-agent: Googlebot-Image with Googlebot. Like this:
User-agent: Googlebot
More information at Google: