Staaarter

Image Sitemap Generator

Add rows of page URL, image URL, and an optional caption, and generates valid sitemap XML using Google's image sitemap extension (xmlns:image), grouping every image under its parent page's single <url> entry the way the spec expects, with XML-escaped output ready to upload. A free online tool from Staaarter, right in your browser.

Runs locallyUpdated 2026-08-04
By Staaarter Team
generatorimagescrawling

Overview

Introduction

Google can often find images on its own by crawling a page's HTML, but that discovery isn't guaranteed for images loaded dynamically, hosted on a separate image CDN domain, or buried deep in a large gallery site.

An image sitemap gives search engines an explicit, structured list of which images belong to which page, and this tool generates that XML from a simple row-based form instead of requiring you to hand-write the nested <url>/<image:image> structure.

What Is Image Sitemap Generator?

A generator that turns rows of {page URL, image URL, caption} into valid sitemap XML using both the base sitemaps.org <urlset> schema and Google's image sitemap extension namespace (xmlns:image="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1").

Rows sharing the same page URL are automatically grouped into a single <url> block with multiple <image:image> children, matching the structure Google's image sitemap documentation expects rather than producing one <url> entry per image.

How Image Sitemap Generator Works

Each row you fill in is validated as needing both a valid absolute http:// or https:// page URL and image URL; rows missing either (or left entirely blank) are skipped from the output and counted, not silently dropped without explanation.

Valid rows are grouped by page URL preserving first-seen order, and for each group a <url><loc>page</loc><image:image><image:loc>image</image:loc>...</image:image>...</url> block is built, with every URL and caption run through XML character escaping.

When To Use Image Sitemap Generator

Building an image sitemap for a photography portfolio, product catalog, or gallery site where images carry real SEO value through Google Images traffic.

Submitting image URLs that live on a separate CDN or subdomain from the page itself, which Google's crawler might not automatically associate with the right page without an explicit sitemap.

Often used alongside XML Sitemap Generator and XML Sitemap Validator.

Features

Advantages

  • Automatically groups multiple images under one page's <url> entry instead of requiring you to hand-build that nested structure, which is the part of the image sitemap spec most likely to get flattened incorrectly by hand.
  • Escapes XML special characters in every URL and caption, avoiding a common cause of malformed sitemap XML from a URL's query string or an ampersand in a caption.
  • Reports how many rows were skipped as invalid, so a typo'd URL doesn't just silently vanish from the generated sitemap without you noticing.

Limitations

  • This only generates the image sitemap XML text; it doesn't verify that the image URLs actually resolve, that they're publicly crawlable, or that they match Google's image sitemap content guidelines (like not linking to images blocked by robots.txt).
  • It doesn't support every optional image sitemap field from Google's older spec (geo_location, license, title) - only <image:loc> and <image:caption>, which cover the fields most sites actually use.

Examples

Two images grouped under one page

Input

Row 1: page https://example.com/gallery, image https://example.com/img/sunset.jpg, caption "Sunset over the bay"
Row 2: page https://example.com/gallery, image https://example.com/img/pier.jpg, caption "" (blank)

Output

<url>
  <loc>https://example.com/gallery</loc>
  <image:image>
    <image:loc>https://example.com/img/sunset.jpg</image:loc>
    <image:caption>Sunset over the bay</image:caption>
  </image:image>
  <image:image>
    <image:loc>https://example.com/img/pier.jpg</image:loc>
  </image:image>
</url>

Both rows share the same page URL, so they're merged into a single <url> block with two <image:image> children; the second image's blank caption simply omits the <image:caption> element.

Best Practices & Notes

Best Practices

  • Only list images that are meaningful content on the page (product photos, article images), not decorative background images or UI icons, which Google's guidelines say not to include.
  • Keep an image sitemap under the same 50,000-URL / 50MB limits as a regular sitemap, splitting a very large image catalog across multiple sitemap files and a sitemap index if needed.

Developer Notes

Grouping is done with a Map keyed by exact trimmed pageUrl string, so "https://example.com/gallery" and "https://example.com/gallery/" are treated as two different pages and produce two separate <url> blocks; keep page URLs consistent across rows for the same page to avoid an accidental split.

Image Sitemap Generator Use Cases

  • Submitting a photography portfolio or product catalog's images to Google Images via a dedicated sitemap
  • Making JavaScript-loaded gallery images discoverable to search engines without relying on crawl-time rendering
  • Documenting which images belong to which page when images are served from a separate CDN domain

Common Mistakes

  • Creating a separate <url> entry per image instead of grouping same-page images together, which works against the sitemap protocol's expectation and can make a large site's sitemap needlessly bloated.
  • Listing image URLs that are blocked by robots.txt or return a non-200 status, which contradicts the sitemap's claim that the image is available and crawlable.

Tips

  • Enter every image for the same page using the exact same page URL string across rows (including trailing slash consistency) so they get grouped into one <url> block instead of accidentally splitting into two.

References

Frequently Asked Questions