FeedMender/Errors/Invalid image
Common rejections
Invalid image [image_link]
Your browser shows the image, Merchant Center calls it invalid, and both are right: they are not looking at the same thing. Google fetches the URL in the feed, cold, with no session, no referer and no logged-in CDN token.
What Google requires
A public, fetchable, well-formed image URL
The image_link must be an absolute URL with an http or https scheme, reachable by Google's fetcher, serving an actual image whose format matches what it claims. There are ceilings as well as floors: files over 16 MB and images over 64 megapixels are refused. One main image per product; additional pictures belong in additional_image_link.
What happens if you do not
Disapproved with a working-looking image
The usual causes are invisible from a browser. A relative path like /img/product.jpg works on the site and is meaningless in a feed. A CDN that answers your logged-in browser returns 403 to Google. An export writes a URL pattern that 404s for a fraction of products. A file served as .jpg that is really WebP fails the format check. Each of these disapproves the product while every human check passes.
How to fix it by hand
Test the URL the way Google fetches it
- Request the exact feed URL from outside your network and session,
curl -Iis enough, and confirm the status is 200 and the content type is an image. - Make every image URL absolute in the export template.
- Whitelist Google's image fetcher in the CDN or bot protection if it is being blocked.
- Serve the format the extension declares, and keep files under the size ceilings.
Which of our checks apply
10 checks apply, read from the scanner's registry
The scan requests every distinct image URL from our server, exactly as a cold fetcher would, and reports the response code, the true format and the measured size per product.
image_invalidblocksimage_unreachableblocksimage_missingblocksimage_schemeblocksimage_non_asciiblocksimage_formatblocksimage_format_mismatchblocksimage_too_largeblocksimage_too_many_pixelsblocksimage_multipleat risk
The quicker way
Let the scan find them
The free scan fetches every image in your feed and tells you which URLs Google will fail on, and why. The scan to identify errors is free and shows every finding before you pay anything. You only pay for the fix.