Introduction 

What does it do? 

A person on a team photo asks not to appear in Google Image Search. Instead of touching templates or moving files, an editor opens the file's metadata, ticks "Do not index in search engines", saves — done. The next time crawlers fetch robots.txt, the file and all its rendered variants are disallowed.

file_noindex works for every file type (images, PDFs, …), independently of where and how the file is referenced, and it needs no configuration.

How it works in a nutshell 

A PSR-15 middleware answers GET /robots.txt. It takes the base rules from your site configuration (the staticText route, if present) and appends Disallow entries for every file whose metadata has the "do not index" flag set:

  • the original file path,
  • all currently existing processed variants (_processed_/…),
  • wildcard patterns covering variants that will be generated in the future.

The response is generated live on every request, so toggling the checkbox takes effect immediately — no cache to flush.

What it is — and what it is not 

It keeps files out of search results 

Crawlers that respect robots.txt (Google, Bing, …) stop indexing the marked files. This is the method Google officially recommends for images.

It is not access protection 

The file stays reachable via its direct link. If you need to actually protect files from being downloaded, use EXT:fal_protect instead.

See Known problems and limits for the full list of deliberate limitations.