Image sitemaps

Add images to an existing sitemap, or create a separate sitemap just for your images. Adding images to a sitemap helps Google discover images that we might not otherwise find (such as images your site reaches with JavaScript code).

Best practices

Follow best practices for publishing images and the Webmaster Guidelines.
You can add image metadata, such as contact information and licensing information, which will appear in image search results.

Example sitemap

The following example shows a sitemap entry for the page http://example.com/sample.html, which contains two images.

<?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>http://example.com/sample.html</loc>
    <image:image>
      <image:loc>http://example.com/image.jpg</image:loc>
    </image:image>
    <image:image>
      <image:loc>http://example.com/photo.jpg</image:loc>
    </image:image>
  </url> 
</urlset>

You can list up to 1,000 images for each page, using the syntax outline in the example above!

Image sitemap reference

XML namespace

The image tags are defined in the following namespace:

image:xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1"

Image tag definitions

The following sitemap tags apply specifically to images. You must use the required tags; we recommend using the optional tags to provide more information and a better user experience.

Tag	Required	Description
`<image:image>`	Yes	Encloses all information about a single image. Each `<url>` tag can contain up to 1,000 `<image:image>` tags.
`<image:loc>`	Yes	The URL of the image. In some cases, the image URL may not be on the same domain as your main site. This is fine, as long as both domains are verified in Search Console. If, for example, you use a content delivery network such as Google Sites to host your images, make sure that the hosting site is verified in Search Console. In addition, make sure that your robots.txt file doesn't disallow the crawling of any content you want indexed.
`<image:caption>`	Optional	A caption for the image.
`<image:geo_location>`	Optional	The geographic location of the image. For example, `<image:geo_location>Limerick, Ireland</image:geo_location>`.
`<image:title>`	Optional	The title of the image.
`<image:license>`	Optional	A URL to the license of the image. You can use image metadata instead, if you like.