Image centric site and duplicate content issues

[wedlinkmedia]

We have a site that has very little text, the main purpose of the site is to allow users to find inspiration through images. 1000s of images come to us each week to be processed by our editorial team, so as part of our process we select a subset of the best images and process those with titles, alt text, tags, etc.

We still host the other images and users can find them through galleries that link to the process and unprocessed image pages.

Due to the lack of information on the unprocessed images, we are having lots of duplicate content issues (The layout of all the image pages are the same, and there isn't any unique text to differentiate the pages. The only changing factor is the image itself in each page)

Any suggestions on how to resolve this issue, will be greatly appreciated.

[wedlinkmedia]

Users can comment on the images, but there is no guarantee that we will get comments, so that is not a solution. Also, as mentioned before, there is no way for our editors to write a piece of unique text for each image. I understand that Google will not like these pages, but our concern is duplicate content, not to optimize these pages for SEO. Thank you for your comment.

[TakeshiYoung]

UGC is probably the best way to go, by allowing users to rate images and leave comments. Also, spending some time to add descriptions to images as well as relevant tags can provide more text content that Google will appreciate.

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Don't think so =/ You need some sort of text for search engines to use so they can better distinguish and understand the images. Alt text and a small caption for each would be a min.

You can also look into getting user generated content via comments/ratings. This would give you relevant content for images and more user engagement at no additional expense.