An image sitemap tells search engines about the images on your pages. Crawlers do not always find images loaded by JavaScript, served from a separate domain, or referenced only in CSS — listing them explicitly gives those images a fair chance of appearing in image search.
How it works
Rather than a separate file, image information is added inside a normal XML sitemap using the image namespace. Each page entry can list the images that appear on it:
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
xmlns:image="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1">
<url>
<loc>https://example.com/gallery</loc>
<image:image>
<image:loc>https://example.com/img/harbour.jpg</image:loc>
</image:image>
</url>
</urlset>Only the image's location is required. Each page may list up to 1,000 images, and the images can live on a different domain from the page as long as you are allowed to reference them.
When it helps
- Galleries and portfolios where images are the main content.
- Product photos on an online store.
- Images served from a CDN on a separate hostname.
- Images lazy-loaded or injected by JavaScript that a crawler might skip.
Descriptive alt text still matters
An image sitemap helps discovery, but it does not replace good
alt
text, descriptive file names and surrounding page content — those are what help an image rank for the
right searches.
Keep reading