How to Create an Image Sitemap (Step by Step)

You can publish a page full of sharp product shots and still watch Google index none of them. It happens more than you would think. If your images load through JavaScript, sit inside a slider, or live deep in a large archive, the crawler can walk right past them. An image sitemap fixes that by handing Google a plain list of every image and the page it belongs to. This guide shows you how to create an image sitemap, what the XML looks like, and how to submit it so your pictures start showing up in search. You can build the file in about a minute with the free Pixellize image sitemap generator.

What is an image sitemap?

An image sitemap is an XML file that lists the images on your site and the page each one appears on. It uses Google’s image namespace with an image:loc tag per image, so crawlers can find and index pictures they might otherwise skip, including images loaded by JavaScript or hidden behind a gallery script.

Think of it like a guest list for a venue with a dozen side rooms. Google can find the main hall on its own. The side rooms, the lazy-loaded carousels, the CDN-hosted thumbnails, those are the ones that get missed. The sitemap names them all in one place. It does not change your images or your pages. It is a separate file that points to them.

Why image sitemaps still matter for SEO

Google Images drives a real slice of search traffic, and image results now sit inside regular search and AI overviews too. If a picture never gets indexed, it never earns a click. An image sitemap will not force a ranking on its own, but it closes the discovery gap, which is the part most sites get wrong. The sitemap solves a discovery problem, not a quality problem. Clean file names and real alt text still decide whether an indexed image ranks.

Some sites need one more than others. Here is where it pays off most:

• Ecommerce stores. Dozens of product shots per page, often served from a CDN on a different hostname Google crawls less often.
• Photo portfolios and stock sites. The images are the product, so image search is a primary traffic channel.
• Publishers and blogs. Years of archived posts with images that no internal link points to anymore.
• Any site using lazy loading or JavaScript galleries. The image URL is not in the raw HTML, so the crawler may never see it.

If none of those sound like you and every image sits in plain HTML, Google probably finds them already. For everyone else, the sitemap is cheap insurance. I added one to a small portfolio site that had 140 images and only 30 indexed. Within three weeks the indexed count more than doubled, and I rebuilt the file in Pixellize each time I added new work.

How to create an image sitemap

You can write the XML by hand, but that only scales to a handful of pages. The faster route is to let a crawler read your site and build the file for you. Here is how to create an image sitemap with the Pixellize image sitemap generator, step by step. The whole thing runs in your browser and nothing about your site is stored.

Step 1: Enter your website URL

Paste your homepage address into the box and press Generate. One URL is enough. The crawler uses it as the starting point and follows internal links from there.

Step 2: Let the crawler find your images

The tool walks your pages and collects every image along with the page it sits on. A live counter shows pages in the queue, pages checked, and images found, so you can watch it work. On larger sites this takes a minute or two.

Step 3: Download the image-sitemap.xml file

When the crawl finishes you get a ready-to-use image-sitemap.xml. Check the XML preview, then click Download, or copy it to paste into your own setup. On a 500-page crawl in our own test, the Pixellize generator found 938 unique images across 292 pages and wrote the whole file in seconds.

Upload the file to your site’s root folder so it lives at a clean address like example.com/image-sitemap.xml. That is the URL you will hand to Google in the next section.

What the image sitemap XML format looks like

The format builds on the open sitemaps.org protocol, so it is simpler than most people expect. Following Google Search Central’s image sitemap guidelines, you start with a standard sitemap, add the image namespace to the opening urlset tag, then nest an image:image block inside each page’s url entry. One block per image, each with an image:loc that holds the full image URL.

<?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/red-shoes.html</loc>
    <image:image>
      <image:loc>https://example.com/photos/red-shoes.jpg</image:loc>
    </image:image>
    <image:image>
      <image:loc>https://example.com/photos/red-shoes-side.jpg</image:loc>
    </image:image>
  </url>
</urlset>

Two things trip people up here. First, image:loc is the only tag you still need. Google retired the image:caption, image:title, image:license, and image:geo_location tags back in 2022, so any template that still writes them is wasting bytes. Second, a single page can list up to 1,000 images, which is Google’s cap per URL entry. If a page somehow has more, split it, though in practice you will never hit that.

You also do not have to host the images on the same domain as your pages. A product page on example.com can point to an image on a CDN like cdn.example.net, and the sitemap handles that fine. That one detail is why CDN-heavy stores benefit so much from an image sitemap generator. Keep each image:loc pointing to the live, final URL rather than a redirect, so Google reaches the picture in a single hop. Redirected image URLs still work, but they slow discovery and spend a little crawl budget on every pass.

How to submit an image sitemap to Google Search Console

To submit an image sitemap to Google, upload the file to your site root, open Google Search Console, go to the Sitemaps report, enter the path like image-sitemap.xml, and click Submit. Google then crawls the file and reports its status, usually within a few days. No extra setup is needed.

Here is the full flow once the file is live:

1. Open Google Search Console and pick the property for your site.
2. In the left menu, click Sitemaps.

3. Type the sitemap path into the “Add a new sitemap” box, for example image-sitemap.xml, and press Submit.

4. Wait for the status to read Success, then check the Pages and Images reports over the next week or two.

You can skip the dashboard entirely if you prefer. Add a line like Sitemap: https://example.com/image-sitemap.xml to your robots.txt and Google will discover it on its next crawl. Not sure your robots file is set up right? Run it through the Pixellize robots.txt checker first. The same logic applies to a video library, which the video sitemap guide walks through. To confirm it worked a day or two later, open the Images report, or paste a key image URL into URL Inspection to see whether Google has indexed it yet.

Separate image sitemap vs images in your main sitemap

You have two choices: add image tags to your existing sitemap, or publish a standalone image sitemap. Both are valid. The right call depends on your site size and how your sitemaps are built.

That last row matters. If you run WordPress with Yoast or Rank Math, open your existing sitemap and look for image:image tags before you build anything. Many sites already have image coverage and do not know it. A separate file is for cases where the plugin falls short or you want full control over which images get listed, which is exactly what the Pixellize generator gives you. If you do not have a main sitemap at all yet, build one first with the Pixellize XML sitemap generator, then layer the image file on top.

Common image sitemap mistakes to avoid

• Listing blocked images. If an image is disallowed in robots.txt, Google ignores it even in a sitemap. Check your rules first.
• Using relative image paths. Every image:loc needs a full, absolute URL. A path like /photo.jpg will not resolve.
• Forgetting to update it. A sitemap from last year misses every new image. Regenerate it when you publish a batch of pages.
• Treating it as a ranking button. The sitemap gets images found. Alt text, file names, and page relevance decide whether they rank.
• Skipping broken images. A sitemap full of 404 image URLs wastes crawl budget. Clean those up, the same way you would hunt down broken links on a website.

Knowing how to create an image sitemap is only half the job. Keeping it accurate is the other half. Set a reminder to rebuild it whenever you ship a big content update, and spot-check the file in Search Console once a month. The Pixellize image sitemap generator makes the rebuild a one-minute task, so there is no excuse to let it go stale. Pixellize keeps the whole flow free, with no account and nothing saved from your crawl.