Underscores, capitals, non ASCII characters in image URLs - does it matter?

[McTaggart]

I see this strangely formatted image URLs on websites time and again - is this an issue - I imagine it isn't best practice but does it make any difference to SEO?

Thanks in advance, Luke

[andy.bigbangthemes]

Can you provide an example?

Cheers

[McTaggart]

Hi Andy - yes, just capitals and non-standard characters in the URLs (bad practice, basically, for URLs) - I don't think an example will help beyond what I've told you - hope that's OK, Luke

[randfish]

It's not best practice for sure, and it doesn't help with SEO (ideally, you want clean, clear, descriptive URLs and paths). That said, if Google can index the content of the page (or the image), it's not a dealbreaker. You can check by using the URL/image path in Google Images e.g. this one.