Do hidden images affect SEO?

[bugboy]

I'm building a photo gallery that fades in images using JS. In order to have the images show when JS is not turned on i'm hiding the images with JS immediately on page load before fading them in.

I know it's 'illegal' to have text just for crawlers then hide it from real users with JS so I'm worried that a search engine crawler will see that I'm hiding images after page load and penalize the page.. even though i am turning them back on again.

Should i be worried?

Also... is there a SE safe way to fade in text?

Thanks!

[Niheel]

In the past google has publicly frowned upon using the hidden:visibili ty to hide text for search engine spamming.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-mistakes-unwise-comments/

There's no real definite answer if it has a negative impact, but I'd guess by now they've figured out what is an hidden image, text, navigation menu and search engine spam.

To be on the safe side, if SEO is that important to you, you can engineer another solution for displaying images that wouldn't require it.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-mistakes-unwise-comments/#comment-1649