Projects: Google Sites Banners and Images

This page provides some tips about Google Sites and its use of image banners, along with information about the built-in image search feature.

Banner Images. One of the distinctive features of the new Google Sites is the use of banner images, large and small. Not all images work well as banners; you need a large image, and Google Sites does an automatic cropping of the image to fit the available space, so you may have to play around with the banner image to find one that you like. Luckily, Google Sites makes it easy to find and try out different images with the built-in image search so that you can find a banner image you like. You can also choose different ways to display the banner image: standard banner, large banner, or cover banner (that's the best option for an image that is taller, so that less of the image will be cropped out).

When you are creating a webpage, you can have a banner image (or not), and you can also have images in the body of the page (or not). It's totally up to you! My personal preference is to have a banner image and to include that same image in the page itself so that people can see the uncropped version of the image; here's an example: Tiger Stories; scroll down to see the banner image displayed inside the page body with the image information.

Image Information: Webpage Source. The built-in image search is limited to "commercial re-use" images, so that means the images are good for you to use. The tricky part is that Google does not make it easy to get the image information you need. Here's how to do that: when you select an image by first clicking on it, look for the webpage address for that image will appear down in the lower left-hand corner, as in this screenshot: 

Before you add the image to your page, click on that webpage source link to open the webpage in a new tab. You will need to keep that tab open so that you can use it to complete the image information section of your page. You can then add the selected image to your page by clicking on the blue Select button. As soon as you have added the image to your page, add a textbox in the body of the page and put the image information in there: a caption, credit to the creator of the image (if known), and a link to the webpage. If you remember to keep the webpage source for the image open in a separate tab, you will be able to get all the image information you need!