sitemap including images

Am I overlooking something? I can't find how to have my Google XML sitemap include image files (.jpg) linked to each url.
Is there no way to do this?

Example from Google webmaster tools:

<?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>

Images in XML sitemaps were first announced 7th April.
And I have not gotten around to supporting it yet.

Personally I don't understand Google does not choose to either support all formats into same XML sitemap file or continue to split up into unique sitemap files. Instead they flip flop between the two things But no matter, implementing support for image data in XML sitemaps will be a snap in A1 Sitemap Generator, so it will most likely make it into release 2.1.5 or 2.1.6

You know how we customers are. Pushy.
Have a time frame? This revision is very
important to me, my site is graphics heavy.
Thanks! The sitemap generator works great.

Barb

Within a couple of weeks at max. Possibly beta out somewhat sooner, e.g. a week or less.

Here is sitemap generator beta

Looks like it worked fine. Thank you for your prompt turnaround!
I will advise how Google digests the sitemap w/images
or if any problems.

Barbyr

Happy to hear. And yes, please keep me informed if you encounter any problems of any sort!

OOPS. Google's webmaster tools now tells me none of my urls are indexed. No other indications of problems with the sitemap:

Format   URLs in Sitemap   Submitted   Downloaded
Sitemap   Total: 6,408, Indexed: 0   
Submitted: May 13, 2010
Downloaded: May 15, 2010
Sitemap errors and warnings: No errors or warnings found.

I normally have 950 indexed urls from my A1-generated sitemap.

Help!

When you add or remove/add an XML sitemaps, that's default behavior in Google. See this article where this behavior is documented. The actual count of indexed URLs is not zero As a side note, I reallly recommend that you submit the Image sitemap in addition to your existing XML sitemap. That will work fine and makes it easier update them separately.

Hmm. Never had that happen before, ever. And Google still shows none indexed. My traffic and rankings remain unchanged as far as I know.

How do I generate two different sitemaps?

It's pretty common, but at this point, some of the URLs should start to get listed as indexed. Anyways, A1 Sitemap Generator is able to generate about 10 different sitemap files. And if using default settings, their file names do not clash and you can just submit those you want (standard XML sitemap, image xml sitemap (I chose to add it as a separate type as that's how Google has handled all their other sitemap file types and most people won't want images in their standard XML sitemaps. Please note that there is no problem in submitting multiple sitemaps even if they share a few URLs), video xml sitemap, mobile sitemap, news sitemap etc.)

Just click any of the links above to read the tutorial for the specific sitemap file kind.

Well, I have both regular and image sitemaps loaded, and Google has acknowledged both with their green checkmark. However, in the "format" column, the xml site map shows "sitemap" but the image sitemap just has "--" as if the format is unrecognized.

The format of the image sitemap appears to follow the example Google gives in their webmaster guidelines, so I don't understand why this happened. I followed all your instructions, Thomas.

In addition, neither of those sitemaps shows any urls indexed. Zero. This has never happened before. Since I began submitting sitemaps, I've always had over 900 urls indexed. Now I have none. What does that mean, if anything? I'm worried.

sitemap urls
http://www.cirrusimage.com/sitemap/sitemap.xml   and sitemap-image.xml

Please upload your sitemap files to:
http://www.cirrusimage.com/sitemap.xml
and
http://www.cirrusimage.com/sitemap-image.xml

(At least in the in past you would need to have sitemaps in root to URLs submitted for it to work!)

Also do notice that when you remove/add a sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools, indexed URLs will reset. It does not not indicate anything but "URLs in sitemap that are verified to be indexed". See this indexed urls article for explanation.

When you have done that then please give it a few days. I believe you will start see it to move then.

I never had my sitemap in the root directory before, and I had over 950 urls indexed by Google.

Did you look at the code in my sitemaps, and does it appear to be correct?
I'm worried submitting multiple sitemaps might be detrimental to my googlebot crawler's activities.
Should I just delete the files in my /sitemap folder and submit them again from the root? (Goolge provides no facility for deleting sitemaps already submitted). Why would the file location have anything to do with it if Google acknowledges the existing sitemaps with its green check mark?

You can get around the requirement, but usually Google will only accept URLs in sitemaps that are below the directory you submit it in. Think about it it this way, 2 people each have their website on a domain.
example.com/Joe
example.com/Tom

Should I (Tom) be able to inform google about URLs on Joe's website. Short answer is no.

(And yes, I did look at the sitemap files.)

I am not sure why you can't delete sitemaps once submitted to Google... I will try write some more in-depth answers and tutorials about this and sitemap file location. (Can't right now this instant as it takes time to take screenshots and write etc. But hopefully within a day)

I just found official resource that also states same as me.

http://sitemaps.org/protocol.php
Section
Sitemap file location

The location of a Sitemap file determines the set of URLs that can be included in that Sitemap. A Sitemap file located at http://example.com/catalog/sitemap.xml can include any URLs starting with http://example.com/catalog/ but can not include URLs starting with http://example.com/images/.

URLs that are not considered valid are dropped from further consideration. It is strongly recommended that you place your Sitemap at the root directory of your web server. For example, if your web server is at example.com, then your Sitemap index file would be at http://example.com/sitemap.xml

You can even also find this topic described in The A1 Sitemap Generator FAQ albeit its topic is slightly different (click link)


in my mind, this gives a quite satisfactory explanation why you are not seeing URLs indexed.

Thomas,

I copied the xml sitemap and put it into the root directory. I'll see what happens with that one.

I'm flooding my own forum tonight it seems

While this should not affect image-sitemap-indexing as such beyond inefficiency, it seems it sometimes adds the same image URL multiple times. I consider it a bug and will fix ASAP, but it should in no way give the problems you are experiencing currently and problem is limited to image sitemaps introduced in 2.1.5

OMG I discovered the problem. All is well, at least with my .xml map.
Sitemap   Total: 973, Indexed: 963   
May 26, 2010
Sitemap errors and warnings
Line   Status   Details
No errors or warnings

All my indexed files were restored within 10 minutes of my resubmission.

Sorry to be such a pain. Thanks for all your help. Now I'll make a new image sitemap too.

Thomas,
I seem to have lost the email with the link you sent me. You made another beta for images sitemaps, yes?
Thanks,
Barbyr

Hello:

Since version 2.1.5 now supports Google images sitemaps, I've been interested in mapping the many thousands of images on my site for submission. Unfortunately, A1 displays "Forbidden 403" (You don't have permission to access /images) in the site analysis for each image directory.  I've confirmed that file permissions are identical for each directory (0777), but it appears that only directories with index.html in them are accepted by A1.  I have added image file type extensions to the analysis filter, but to no avail.

Any feedback is welcome.  If you would like, I could send you my configuration file.

To Barbyr:

I will post link to new beta here. It's actually a rather large update on the inside (not related to image sitemaps) which is why it's not released in public yet. I will create a new build later tonight!


To Das Capitolin:

What's your website address? Feel free to email me your A1 Sitemap Generator project file! I will be happy to take a look

It is going to be late today/tonight instead. Sorry for the delay, but I am finishing up last couple of things before releasing new beta build

New betas posted, please see this thread for links

Thomas, are you still here? I can't get the latest release to work at all now. It just locks up my machine when I tell it to build the image sitemap. Help!
Bruce

Thomas, are you still here? I can't get the latest release to work at all now. It just locks up my machine when I tell it to build the image sitemap. Help!
Bruce

I reported this to him as well.  My images number beyond 11,000 so it wasn't surprising, but when I delete many of the images (down to 400 or so) the sitemap only lists a few random images.

Sent over email. And working on the problem you reported as well. Sorry for the delay

Sent over email. And working on the problem you reported as well. Sorry for the delay

We appreciate all of your hard work.  I know you've got a lot to look at with this new version.  Thank you for your efforts!

Here is the 2.2.1 beta

I identified the issue which could cause endless loop when building image sitemaps for some websites.

Sorry for the long time

Thanks everyone for continuing reporting this issue to me.



By the way, this beta includes an offline copy of the new improved A1 Sitemap Generator help. This makes the download somewhat larger. I am currently considering if/how/what to do about that But I am aware the download file has increased to 5.5 mb

By the way, this beta includes an offline copy of the new improved A1 Sitemap Generator help. This makes the download somewhat larger. I am currently considering if/how/what to do about that But I am aware the download file has increased to 5.5 mb

I won't speak for others, but to me 5.5MB is really nothing at all. That's much smaller than most anti-virus definition downloads.

What I am doing now is converting all images in help to 256 colors. I think that reduces help size with about 50%. After that, I will just be happy and ship the entire help with the downloads. As you say, most people will not mind and probably instead appreciate being able to access the complete help at all times

Do please let me know if you find any continued problems with image sitemaps. I am finally catching up to my backlog of todo things, so I will be very focused on clearing out bugs/problems in 2.2.1 until release! (I really hate bugs, but you can't avoid them at times... unfortunately)

What I am doing now is converting all images in help to 256 colors. I think that reduces help size with about 50%.

I suggest using PNG or GIF, with 128 color count and significant color snap. These will be much smaller than JPGs.

I ended up with converting to 256 colors.
I then made 2.2.1 releases of all A1 products available.

I have afterwards also run
http://www.smushit.com/ysmush.it/
against all images cutting 3-5% extra (not really worth the time, but have you first begun then...)

I am also working on making the entire microsystools.com website a bit faster in hope of slightly improving bounce rates and adwords scores further
When done, I will probably also see if this forum can become a little faster