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thinkingpixels wrote:sorry, it's me again, I stumbled upon yet another question:
I love it that Imagevue generates an XML sitemap, but it only includes the menu structure, not each individual landing page for each image. Would it be possible to have the sitemap include every single landing page for each photograph?

I may look into it, although it could create excessively large XML files. Also, I am wondering if it's really necessary ... Google only uses the sitemap to locate pages that perhaps can't be found from links in your website. Image landing pages are already linked inside your website, so technically speaking, the sitemap really has no function in X3 ... It just exists "because we can".

What I'm more worried about, is that this sitemap has to be created in a single PHP process, looping through ALL folders recursively. Add images, and it will need to loop through all images in all folders also, in a single process thread. We would likely need to add settings to "include images in sitemap", such as not to have a page that could break- or timeout, unknowingly to the website owner.

I feel somewhat hesitant about this feature, although I guess there is no good reason why we can't add it as an option. I don't see any logical reason in 2016 to focus much on sitemap, unless you have pages that are not linked from anywhere (which is not the case with X3). There is no evidence anywhere (web articles) that a sitemap will improve Google's indexing, and really no logical reason why it should either.

Another question arises: Google sitemaps already has a specific method for adding "images" to sitemaps: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/178636

Thus, this asks the question, should one really be linking to the image-landing pages as if they were web pages? Or should one just add the images into the sitemap as Google suggests in the link above? The latter is after all the method Google prefers for indexing image files, thus to relate them to "image searches". My experience tells me it would be unproductive trying to add both ... Google will want to funnel a search in the direction of an image, and it won't help to force two different links, technically/logically to the same page/image.

For all I know, Google may already have figured out that image-landing pages are basically placeholders for images, and thus will not index them in normal web search. Maybe it will instead index the images contained within, for it's image search engine.

Just thinking aloud. I will add to my list ...

thinkingpixels wrote:Hm, well, if we could have images directly in the sitemap, not the landing page, but including <image:title> and <image:caption> from the information that we set in Imagevue, that would be even better!

You are probably right.

thinkingpixels wrote:The goal that I have is, that when someone searches on Google images for something that matches my images' title or caption, that my photos show up in Google's index, and ideally, when I have lots of photos that have a common theme, e.g. all include "Cologne At Night" in the title, then that my page/gallery becomes like an authority for that search term on images... A logic like that already worked pretty well for me for normal web content - would be great if that worked on images too.

You seem to have some knowledge with search and SEO, but I must say ... It doesn't matter how loud you shout your images or web pages to Google. They will only become higher-ranking and more authoritative in search if your pages and/or images are linked to from other pages with some rank. If Google already "knows" about your pages and images, there is no chance in hell that a sitemap will improve your search ranking for a page that Google already knows about. Why would it?

I must admit, I don't have much experience as to how Google deals with image indexing, but an image certainly won't get MORE credibility just because it exists in the website's own sitemap ...

thinkingpixels wrote:So if in a future version of Imagevue you could consider adding images directly to the sitemap, the way that Google suggests, including title and caption (unless empty), that would be amazing!

I'll add it to my list ... I need to add some measures so that it doesn't create sitemaps with 1000s of images, which not only may make the XML file too large, but could break the creation process if the server can't handle it.

thinkingpixels wrote:Some potential customers might not know about me, but if they search for images on the web that they can't find in regular stock archives and often stumble upon images that hold my copyright info, they might have a closer look at my website, while they otherwise might not have.

Certainly. The more SEO boost one can get, the better, no doubt. As far as I am concerned, and as far as as topics covering "google images seo", the best you can do for Google to understand your images, is to use related image names, and add to ALT tag- and title tag in html code, which X3 already does.
https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/opini ... age-search

thinkingpixels wrote: I'll just have to add visual copyright info on my newer images again, but that's easily done. By the way, that might be an interesting feature for Imagevue as well, an option to add visual copyright info e.g. © 2016 André M. Hünseler | thinkingpixels.com in a corner of the image, maybe an option upload a watermark png file for it, something like that. Also just thinking out loud...

Yes, would be nice ... Problem is, when it's done on server, it re-compresses JPG images when saving, which degenerates the quality.

I know this is an old post, but I have an update coming in regards to Google Images Sitemap in X3, please read:
viewtopic.php?f=51&t=10650&p=49984