After answering some other questions it occurred to me that Google may have been incentivized by our intention and ability to improve results for image searches. E.g at scrape time, when an image becomes a “pin”, we were essentially creating a enriched view of that image for which Google is able to surface.
Imagine a scenario where the original image was linked in the page as “main.jpg” or “flower.jpg”.
There may or may not be useful signals on the page for Google to infer from. In the case where the image is saved on Pinterest, the title may come from an expert user who submits, “Trumpet Daffodil”. This is a lot more precise and searchable.
We would go out of our way to append keywords to the end of page and image filenames to make those even more relevant. A final file name for this image would be, “eb761df34b9219ffc68e5c9e55a134f0—-trumpet-daffodil.jpg”