Image Spinning

As most of you are aware, you can now drop an Image into Google Image search and it will show you visually similar images.

Of course this leads to the fact that Google know whether or not you are using images taken from somewhere else, or if they're actually unique.

Whether this has any SEO impact right now is still unknown. I prefer to 'spin' my images, because I feel that it will be good for long-term stability should Google ever place any weight on Unique Images (if it hasn't done so already).

What this can be used for:
I came up with this method because I make sites that have many articles dripped. So because I'm spinning a batch of articles, I figured why not give them all unique images to go with them and make it appear as unique and natural as possible.

Known Issues:
If you blindly do this and don't look at the output, it may look a bit dodgy to a manual review. In 90%+ of cases you're fine. Much like text spinning, the more you spin it, the higher chance it'll look like crap.

Required Software:
- Scrapebox (used for grabbing tonnes of images, not 100% necessary if you can get images another way)
- Photoshop

How to do it:
Grabbing the images:
- Load up Scrapebox, and install the Addon called "Google Image Grabber". (If you don't have SB, obtain your images another way, and place them all in a folder together).
- Add in the keywords you want images of. Be specific, i.e. for Real Estate put "Houses" and "Family Home" .etc.
- Run it. The number of Images per KW will depend on how many you require. Make sure you choose an empty target folder, and enable over-write to ensure you don't get duplicates. Choose Medium for your image size in most case.
- Once you've downloaded the images, go to "View Images"
- Delete any that are unsuitable or appear to be duplicates (I'll have more on this later)

Photoshopping them:
- In photoshop, go to Window > Actions.
- Open up your first image.
- Hit the "New Action" button in the Actions window.
- Hit the little "Record" button in Photoshop
- Using the "Marquee Tool", select the entire image.
- Right-Click, and hit "Transform", Distort the image minorly by pulling the top right-hand corner up and to the right by around 20% of the height of the image. Press Enter to save the changes.
- Re-select the whole image with the Marquee tool
- Transform > Flip Horizontally.
- Re-select the whole image using the Marquee tool
- Go to Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation
- Hue +10, Saturation +20, Darkness -5, Hit Enter
- Go to Image > Image Size, Untick "Constrain Proportions", change the height to 85%, hit Enter.
- Go to Image > Image Size, Tick "Constrain Proportions", set image width to 400px (or whatever you like)
- Go File > Save for Web, Quality should be 60-80, Jpeg. Save this in a brand new folder, but DO NOT change the file name (it'll end up overwriting during a batch save).
- Hit "Stop" in the Actions Window. You've now made a new Action which can be applied to a whole batch.
- Go to File > Automate > Batch
- Select the Action you just created (PS will prob have already selected it)
- Choose your Source Folder
- Choose Destination Folder (a new folder)
- Errors: Log to File - you don't want to get interrupted just because of some errors, you have better things to do than that!

Renaming:
- A dead-giveaway that an image is a duplicate is the filename. Download a batch renamer like 123renamer. Any will do. Just rename them as 000####.jpg or something, and you'll be fine.

Choosing suitable images:
Here are some tips for when choosing which images to keep and remove in SB before Exporting.
- Choose images with similar proportions. Doesn't need to be that close, but don't pick a really tall image and a really wide image, it might screw up.
- Choose images that don't contain text if you plan on flipping it horizontally.
- Try to avoid watermarked images.
- Check the images after you ran the Batch Automation, to make sure they came out fine.

Modifying the Process:
The parts I've written in Blue font are those which can easily be changed to suit your images better, or be improved upon. These settings worked for me fine, but they won't work for every batch. I used it on around 2000 images of houses - it worked awesome! Feel free to play around with various filters and distortion techniques. Ultimately you want to make it unique while still making sure it looks decent to the human eye.