How to fix: Unable to show image

It might take up to 3 days for your product image to appear

Reasons why the issue is happening

We have not yet been able to successfully retrieve the image you have specified in your product data. Please see some common reasons for this below. Affected products will be disapproved until a valid image is retrieved.

How to fix the issue

Determine which issue applies to your account:

The image crawl rate is too slow

It can take up to 3 days for a product image to be crawled and retrieved. You can increase the crawl rate in Google Search Console or move your images to a faster server. It’s also possible that the images you submitted for these products are pending a crawl.

You recently submitted your products to Google

If your items were recently submitted, there may be a delay before the server fetches and crawls the images. Your items will not serve in Shopping ads or free listings until your images have been crawled.
If you are experiencing a low crawl speed, ensure that your servers are not returning 500 or similar errors. You can also adjust the crawl rate in Google Search Console.
If you need to update large numbers of images at a time, submit a portion of your new images, such as 10%, each day so that Google can continuously crawl the new URLs.

Your product images aren’t live yet, or you recently updated the images

Make sure that the image URLs you submit in your data feed are live in your serving system and available for Google to crawl.
A new image can take up to 6 weeks to appear in your ad or listing if the image URL remains unchanged.
To allow the systems to identify the change and crawl the new image quickly (typically within 3 days), use a new image URL and update it in your product data whenever you change an image.

Your product images aren't supported

Make sure your images are in one of the supported formats (GIF, JPG, JPEG, PNG, BMP, or TIF) and include the appropriate extensions for their file names.
Make sure that your images meet the size requirements. Learn more about image size requirements
To successfully process an image, its associated URL must link to an image file rather than to a script.

Your product image URLs aren’t working correctly

If your image URLs don't work, an image won't be displayed for your product in our listings.
Check that all your image URLs are working correctly.
Make sure that there are no spaces within your image URLs. Each space should be replaced with the characters %20. Otherwise, the server will not be able to crawl your image and it will not appear in results.
Avoid: http://www.example.com/my picture.jpg
Use: http://www.example.com/my%20picture.jpg
An image link should link directly to the URL of that image. If the image link in your data feed redirects to another URL, the server won't be able to grab a copy of your image to use when showing your product.
The image URLs that redirect through ASP, PHP, or ColdFusion scripts will also fail to be fetched.

Your product images have HTTP headers

If the header information for an image is different from the expected, the image processor will not be able to cache a copy of your image. Typically, headers are only an issue for images that are dynamically generated.
Two header fields that must be passed are content-type and content-length:
- Content-type describes the file type you're sending. Two common values for images are image/gif and image/jpeg.
- Content-length gives information about the file size for an image.
If you choose to add header fields, make sure they're appropriate for the image. Do not select "cache-control".

A robots.txt file on your server is blocking access

A robots.txt file on your server prevents Google from crawling the images on your site. For the server to access these images, modify your robots.txt file to allow both user-agents "Googlebot" and "Googlebot-Image" to crawl your site. Learn more about the robots.txt
Enable Google to crawl your site by adding the following lines to your robots.txt file:

User-agent: Googlebot Disallow:

User-agent: Googlebot-Image Disallow:

If your issue requires changes to a product (or multiple products), follow the instructions below:

Fix products one by one directly in Merchant Center

Step 1 Go to Products in Merchant Center, then select the Needs attention tab.

Step 2 Use the filter icon above the table to find all products affected by your issue.

Step 3 Click on the title of the product you want to fix, then click Edit product.

Step 4 Determine which issue applies to your account, and then make the necessary changes.

Step 5 Select Save.

Fix multiple products at once

Step 1 Go to Products in Merchant Center, then select the Needs attention tab.

Step 2 Use the filter icon above the table to find all products affected by your issue.

Step 3 Select the Download icon to download a list (.csv) of all affected products for all issues or this particular issue.

Step 4 Cross reference the downloaded list with your uploaded product data, determine which issue(s) apply to your account, and then make the necessary changes.

Step 5 Reupload your corrected product data to Merchant Center using your chosen upload method.

Next steps

After making the requested changes, check that you’ve fixed the issue by making sure it’s no longer listed on the “Needs attention” page.

Keep in mind: It may take some time for your change to be reflected on the “Needs attention” page.

Was this helpful?

How can we improve it?