X3Photo Gallery Forums

ed_f wrote:It doesn't work on Google alone, even though the map is uploaded to Google only and Google asked for identification?

I'm not sure what you mean here. First of all, you don't "upload" sitemap.xml to Google, you just notify Google about the existence of your sitemap.xml. It will then, at some point, read the sitemap.xml and study the links inside.

Also, /sitemap.xml is added to the root of your website, and it's normal that most search engines will look for sitemap.xml in that specific location, and use it if found. Why not? The whole point of sitemaps are to help all search engines locate pages and images on your website. Why would you limit it to Google only?

The Images Sitemap Creator was included in latest release X3.32.0. See release post:
photo.gallery/blog/photo-gallery-x3-32/

ed_f wrote: a week after creating sitemap (and pushing it to google) images with names of people in description still do not appear in searches. can I improve results, how?

One week is not very long. According to this post, it could take from 4 days to 6 months. And that would be relative to your website authority, traffic and relevance.

Happy to take a look if you send a link, but it may easily take longer than one week.

You do seem a bit suspect about this script, which I guess is understandable. There is no "magic wand" to get images ranked high on Google, as it depends on your website authority, popularity, relevance of images, context of images, and how unique they are. This script will notify Google about your images that it otherwise might not find, nothing more nothing less. What it decides to do after indexing your images is up to Google, and X3 can't offer anything more from a technical perspective. You will likely find your images, eventually, under specific site:search at least, and possibly under unique searches if your website is popular enough and your images are specific and unique enough. You are competing with billions of other images that also want to get ranked in search, and Google will show the ones it thinks are best match for the user/search.

ed_f wrote: thanks, I was just wondering if it is enough to just mention something (here: someone) in „description“.

It's not clear what you mean.

If you have an image name "giraffe.jpg", then that itself implies that the image contains a giraffe. Google doesn't need any more info than that to be able to index your image, and it doesn't know what a "description" is. If the page the image is on (image landing page?) has more details about giraffe "long neck, lives in Africa etc", this will provide Google with more information about the image, and possibly boost it's importance.

ed_f wrote: does that mean that „description“ just isn't seen by a searchengine at all? i.g. I do not change my filenames.

If the page that the image is on contains additional related information about the image, then this can be considered the images "description". In the case of X3 images in the sitemap linking to the image landing page, that page will of course include the image's description. What Google makes of this is up to Google, but as noted previously, it will look at the image, image name and the text/context of the page the image is on. This text/info may then be used to display the image in search.

You might be overcomplicating? It's quite straight-forward. Let's search for a bird "black-capped chickadee" on Google > Images:



It will show images that best match the search, with images on pages that display best information about the subject, on websites that have collected authority and rank through popularity. Clicking the image will show an enlarged version, which links to the page that contains the image, displaying text and meta data from the page.



The image url itself is just a name, with very little info.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... 69%29.jpeg

The reason the image is listed so high, is because it's then linked to a page with perhaps the best information about the image search, in this case Wikipedia, which carries much authority:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-capped_chickadee

For Google, there is no such specific thing as "description". It will find images, and then rank them based on the subject of the image, and the related content on the page it's on. In this example, it will find a lot of information on the target link specifically for "Black-capped chickadee", thus it will rank very high.

One thing is getting your images indexed, another thing is being able to rank high in search. It's almost impossible for private websites to rank high on generic search, unless your website covers unique search phrases.

With X3 when using the sitemap, Google will find your image descriptions on the "image landing page" and possibly use it to compliment the image in related search. There is no such specific thing as "image description" for Google or other search engines.

ed_f wrote:of course I was always referring to the description field of your gallery, which is the same i.e. in bridge.

Yes, and X3 will show that description on the image landing page, which is one of the reasons it's useful to link each image inside it's own image landing page. You can't just tell Google what the description for an image is up front ... It doesn't care ... It wants to see what humans will see when they find the image, so it can consider the image's worthiness on image searches.

ed_f wrote:my test is someone known (to certain people) with a very rare name (like mine ;-)), of whom google finds only one single (bad) photo. I lookout to when it finds mine. I'll check regularily and report.

Sure. You can even search "site:yourwebsite.com certain person with rare name" to see if Google has indexed your image. The point of the sitemap.xml in X3 isn't to make your images rank higher than images from other websites. It's to make sure Google indexes your images with correct information in the first place. It's then up to the quality and context of your website and the images in your website to decide how well they rank amongst all images related to the same search phrase on other websites.