Do search engines always pay heed to no index instructions?

[BallyhooLtd]

Hi,

I am currently working on a site that relies solely on it's images to attract traffic. My concern is that search engines will index our images, make them available through image searches and therefore allow our potential visitors to bypass our website completely.

I know that there are a number of methods available such as disallowing images in robots.txt or using "noimageindex" tags in the HTML etc. but do search engines always pay attention to these requests?

Does anyone have any experience with no indexing images? Or are there any methods that are guaranteed to work?

Thanks in Advance.

[jeremycbray]

I use no index images on my personal site, as i love to photograph weird and wonderful things around melbourne. the engines crawl but dont index.

a little tip, if you are concerned about image theft, implement code so that images can't be saved to file.