SmartFrame’s technology doesn’t rely on displaying conventional image files, which, technically, makes it invisible to search engines. This prevents programmatic downloads and website cloning.

Therefore, in order to ensure correct SEO indexing, we detect visits from image indexing crawlers such as Google Images, Bing and Yahoo Image Search, and serve a JPEG thumbnail instead.

The JPEG thumbnail generated by SmartFrame can be configured to contain metadata necessary for display in search results, such as an image credit and license button.

Google will usually rank larger thumbnails higher. If you decide to use large thumbnails, we suggest including a watermark on the thumbnail, which will prevent unauthorized downloads directly from Google Images. SmartFrame will embed the agreed watermark automatically.

SmartFrame also generates thumbnails and metadata for sharing on social networks, and detects when links to SmartFrames are being posted on Facebook, X, LinkedIn and Pinterest.