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

Our documentation on sitemaps also applies to the sitemap extensions. Make sure to follow general sitemap guidelines.
Follow the best practices for publishing images and the Search Essentials.
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 with two <url> elements:

https://example.com/sample1.html, which contains two images
https://example.com/sample2.html, which contains one image

<?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/sample1.html</loc>
    <image:image>
      <image:loc>https://example.com/image.jpg</image:loc>
    </image:image>
    <image:image>
      <image:loc>https://example.com/photo.jpg</image:loc>
    </image:image>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/sample2.html</loc>
    <image:image>
      <image:loc>https://example.com/picture.jpg</image:loc>
    </image:image>
  </url>
</urlset>

Each <url> element may have up to 1,000 child image:image elements.

Image sitemap reference

XML namespace

The image tags are defined in the following namespace:

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

Image tag definitions

To make sure Google can discover your image sitemap, you must use the following required tags:

Required tags

<image:image> Encloses all information about a single image. Each <url> tag can contain up to 1,000 <image:image> tags.

Required tags
`<image:image>`	Encloses all information about a single image. Each `<url>` tag can contain up to 1,000 `<image:image>` tags.
`<image:loc>`	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:loc>

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.

Deprecated tags and attributes

We removed the following tags and attributes from our documentation: <image:caption>, <image:geo_location>, <image:title>, <image:license>. See the deprecation announcement for more information.