Image sitemap

The image sitemap extension uses the image: namespace to declare images embedded on each page. It's documented by Google and the only practical way to give Google Images explicit signals about images on JS-rendered or paywalled pages.

When you need one

Galleries, product catalogs, real-estate listings — sites where image traffic is a meaningful share of organic.
JavaScript-rendered pages — if your images are lazy-loaded or rendered after the initial HTML, Google's image crawler may miss them.
Pages behind a soft paywall — if Googlebot sees the page but the image URLs aren't in the HTML it indexes.

For a typical blog or marketing site where images are obvious in the HTML, you don't need an image sitemap — Google will discover the images via the regular <img> tags.

Anatomy

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<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/products/red-sneaker</loc>
    <image:image>
      <image:loc>https://cdn.example.com/red-sneaker-front.jpg</image:loc>
      <image:caption>Red sneaker, front view</image:caption>
    </image:image>
    <image:image>
      <image:loc>https://cdn.example.com/red-sneaker-side.jpg</image:loc>
      <image:caption>Red sneaker, side profile</image:caption>
    </image:image>
  </url>
</urlset>

Supported child elements

Element	Required?	Notes
`image:loc`	Yes	Absolute URL of the image. Must be on the same hostname OR a verified property.
`image:caption`	No	Human-readable description
`image:title`	No	Title of the image
`image:geo_location`	No	"City, Country" or "Latitude, Longitude"
`image:license`	No	URL to the license text

Limits

Up to 1,000 images per <url> entry.
Per-page limit makes large catalogs use multiple URLs. If a product has 50 images, that's fine; if a "wallpapers" page hosts 5,000 thumbnails, split it into multiple pages.

Common mistakes

Listing the same image under multiple URLs. Wastes crawl budget; pick the canonical page.
Hotlinking external images (a different domain you don't control). Google may not trust the signal. Self-host or use a verified subdomain.
Decorative images. Don't declare decoration images (logos, icons). Only content images that have indexing value.
Missing alt text in the HTML. Image sitemaps are a complement, not a replacement, for proper <img alt=""> attributes.

What SitemapHost does

The SitemapHost API accepts an images array per URL entry. Each item supports loc, caption, title, geo_location, and license. We emit the standards-compliant image: markup and respect the 1,000-image limit per URL.

`image:image`