I'm curious about how Google images works. When someone searches for a term in images and results come up, is the searcher actually downloading the images from each website and their IP address is accessing each site? Or is Google downloading the images on their servers and presenting it to the searcher? I'm curious because I'm a photographer. Thanks for any help you can provide.
The images are being downloaded from your site. It will be part of your bandwidth. Although that does not seem like the answer you are looking for, are you trying to stop people from pirating your images or just worried about bandwidth?
More worried about pirating of my images. Is there anyway to tell what IP addresses have been used to view my photos in Google Images using a traffic tracker like Google Analytics? Or is it only possible to know IP addresses if someone clicked on my image and were brought to my site? Sorry if these questions are stupid . I'm not very familiar with this stuff. Thanks again.
I am not sure of the different ways of tracking IP addresses but I know that when they actual file is downloaded it is coming from your server. As for people stealing the images, you could use a third party service like copyscape.
In google the images are also being displayed by the anchor text to insert for those images, the alt tag or title. The solution for your images being stolen on the net is by inserting a small water-mark which should be visible to the naked eyes. Make sure you have a specially designed water-mark for that which should be inserted in all the images you post on the net
Although I did not understand how its image is manufactures, but I thought that for security, definitely has some secrets