I was thinking of making a 'load on scroll' image gallery plugin, i.e. I do not want the image to load until it is in view in the viewport. That got me thinking in terms of implementation.I don't want to use markup that would mean that the images were not indexed by Google, but the question is, what can you do?You can't have img tags but then stop the files from being loaded because that defeats the purpose completely. You could not care about the markup and use image site maps instead, but that makes life harder for the person using the plugin. What, if anything, can one do?
Does Google index images in anything other than an img tag?
seo;html;images
Google indexes images that are either:In an image tag -- <img src=foo.jpg>The target of link -- <a href=foo.jpg>If you want to remove an image from the page but still have it indexed from that page, make a link to it on that page.This is a very good technique for image search optimization anyway.   Google ranks very large images better than smaller images.   The larger size images are harder to fit on page and take longer for users to download (slowing down the entire page load).   A technique that works well is to use the thumbnail in the img tag but link to the larger image: <a href=/img/full/foo.jpg><img src=/img/thumb/foo.jpg></a>