Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Don't have an exact date, but the UI feature is relatively new. I agree with @effectdigital that this is a general capability that Google has been building/expanding for a while. It's helpful to look at that underlying logic, as it will spawn new features over time.

Hi Jared! Just following up here as I've just seen your ticket submitted to our Help Desk. We will be in touch soon!

Thank you for the feedback. I will email them tonight.

Thank you, Matthew. It's strange that Google would not allow more control over what is being listed under the meta-description in rankings. I appreciate your feedback.

Howdy. The strategy is the same as Reputation Management. See where the ranked images are coming from (your website, other websites, social media etc), see the topics of those pages, and see the anchor text cloud for those pages. Basically, besides the alt tag, it's topical and semantic correlation of the page, which is tied to the images as well. As far as I understand, if page ranks for the query, images on that page will rank as well (or at least will have a high chance). Then start building links with proper anchor texts to other pages and websites, which you want it to rank for that query Hope this helps.