Image not processed
What causes the "Image not processed" error in Merchant Center and how to fix it.
This error means Google's crawler tried to fetch and process your image_link but failed, often a timeout, server error, or malformed file. Fix it by making sure the URL loads reliably and quickly, then re-submit.
What triggers it
"Image not processed" means Google's crawler reached (or tried to reach) the image_link but couldn't successfully process what came back, distinct from unable to show image, where the URL is unreachable altogether. Here the request often partially succeeds: a timeout mid-download, a server error, or a file that isn't a cleanly encoded image.
This is usually a hosting or file-integrity problem rather than a feed data problem: the URL is correct, but what's served at that URL isn't reliably processable.
/tools validates image URLs for reliability and format before they're submitted, so hosting problems get caught ahead of a Diagnostics failure rather than after.
Step by step
- Load the image_link URL directly. Open the exact URL from your feed, not the page it appears on, and confirm it loads quickly and returns a valid image, not an error page or a slow redirect chain.
- Check hosting reliability and response time. Timeouts and intermittent server errors on the image host are the most common cause. A CDN or image host that's slow or occasionally errors will fail Google's crawler even if it works for you.
- Confirm the file itself isn't corrupted or malformed. A file that opens in some viewers but isn't a properly encoded image will fail processing even with a working URL.
- Re-submit once the URL and file are confirmed reliable. There's no manual re-review needed, the error clears on the next successful crawl.