Sitemap Glossary

What is Image Sitemap?

A sitemap extension that includes image URLs to help search engines discover and index images.

Written by SitemapKit Editorial TeamUpdated: Jul 21, 2026

Key takeaways

Interpret Image Sitemap in its sitemap XML context; the detailed definition below explains its role and constraints.
Validate Image Sitemap against a real XML example instead of relying on the field or tag name alone.

An image sitemap uses the `image` namespace extension to include image URLs within a standard XML sitemap. This helps search engines like Google discover images that might not be found through regular crawling, especially images loaded via JavaScript or CSS.

Each `<url>` entry can contain up to 1,000 `<image:image>` elements. The only required tag within each image entry is `<image:loc>` (the image URL), but you can also include `<image:title>`, `<image:caption>`, and `<image:license>`.

Image sitemaps are particularly valuable for e-commerce sites with many product images and photography/stock image sites.

XML example

<?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/widget</loc>
    <image:image>
      <image:loc>https://example.com/images/widget-front.jpg</image:loc>
      <image:title>Widget - Front View</image:title>
    </image:image>
  </url>
</urlset>

Continue with SitemapKit

Check an XML sitemap

Inspect Image Sitemap in a real sitemap.

Extract sitemap URLs

Turn XML sitemap fields into structured, exportable URL data.

API documentation

See how this concept appears in SitemapKit API responses.

Practical sitemap workflows

Apply sitemap concepts to SEO, monitoring, and data pipelines.

Sources and further reading

Work with sitemaps programmatically

SitemapKit's API discovers and parses XML sitemaps into structured JSON, including fields such as Image Sitemap.

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