Google updated its Google image SEO best practices help document to recommend that you use the same image file name URL for the same image, even if you place that same image on different pages on your site.
Google said you should do this to save with your site’s overall crawl budget.
What Google changed. Google added the following two lines to the Google image SEO best practices help document:
“If an image is referenced on multiple pages within a larger website, consider the site’s overall crawl budget. In particular, consistently reference the image with the same URL, so that Google can cache and reuse the image without needing to request it multiple times.”
Google wrote, “We updated the Google Image SEO best practices to clarify that URLs for images should be referenced consistently for easier crawling on larger websites.”
Why it matters. This is a logical web design tip that simply makes sense. If you are using the same image on multiple pages, why upload the image multiple times to your server, using different file names. It not only takes up unnecessary space on your servers but it also requires Google to crawl more, just to find a duplicate image under a different URL.
Why we care. So if you are doing this, you may want to find a way for your content management system and website software to help you find the original URL of that image and not duplicate that image URL. There may be ways for your developers to go back in time to find duplicate images on your site and consolidate the URLs of those images to the original URL and file name.
One way to do that is potentially to use reverse image detection software.
Overall, I would not say this is a big savings for crawl budget, but every little bit may help for really large sites.