Google now appear to be only showing an Author image once per page in the Google results.
Up until recently if you had 2 pages appear on the same page in the SERPs your Google Author image would appear alongside both of them.
If you had other sites which you were the author of on the same page it wasn’t uncommon to see your Author image 4 or more times.
This appears to have changed now and only the highest listing shows your Author image with all subsequent listings just showing by “name” under the title.
Interestingly, it is once per displayed Google Page.
If you have Google set to display 10 results your author image can display on pages 1, 2, 3, 4, etc.
If you have Google set to display 100 results your author image only appears once in the top 100, once between 100 and 200, once between 200 and 300, etc.
Update: 06/06/2012
Interestingly if another page is using microdata and has review stars displayed in the SERPs the author image still shows but is smaller and displayed under the description.
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It totally make sense. It was a mess before. They are still so “1998″ with G+ and testing everything along the way. The difference is that in the past they didn’t have that much “heat” upon them and that can also lead to some childish mistakes along the way.
I have to agree it could look a bit naff when they were showing the same author image multiple times on the same page.
I have 6 or 7 sites that my author image displays next to and had a little experiment set up that had my author image showing 10 times on the Google 1st page
I noticed this too. We wrote a plugin for WordPress to help people get rel=author implemented properly, now all my screenshots on the plugin site have multiple instances of my face and other people’s faces which are now not reproducible. I don’t really mind Google’s eternal beta approach to web service development, but, I think they could keep us better informed. As if.