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Hi Katie - You are one of several people I've seen raise this very question about analytics. The answer is - we don't know yet how this will affect data. It's a really good question! Stay tuned and I am sure there will be an avalanche of posts about this all over the web over the next couple of months. Right now, what seems clear to me is: having a really good photo is critical in the carousel; some businesses are coming up with a Google Map instead of a photo and that certainly looks generic. having your citations in good shape are really important, because once someone clicks on the image, everything below the carousel looks like some form of a citation to me you still need to do everything you've already been doing in terms of having a strong website, a clean Google+ Local listing, reviews and citations. Beyond this, the next few weeks will point out strategy changes, if any, for local business owners to be aware of. This is going to be quite a ride!

I don't know of any ultimate guides, but I can answer your questions: ALT Tags - This is the most important property for SEO. Use your keywords here. Image Title - This has zero SEO value for Google, but can provide a good user experience URL of JPG - This has SEO impact, use a relevant name:" keyword-keyword.jpg" not "IMG00001.jpg" Schema - I haven't seen any concrete studies, but semantic markup helps Google determine what the image is about, so it can potentially help. Use it if it makes sense. Meta Tags - Meta tags don't matter Pinterest - Pinterest pulls all images on a page automatically as long as they are bigger than 80x80 pixels Other social - Facebook Opengraph tags are great because they allow you to specify what image will be used when your content is shared on FB. However, it has no impact on SEO. Other factors for image SEO: People linking to the image, the content surrounding the image (should be related to your image), the overall theme of your site (should be related to the image), use large, high quality images. I think that about covers it.