Skip to main content
XMLDir

Search 309 pages — tools, formats, elements, namespaces, directory, comparisons, XPath, datatypes, glossary, parse errors, schema errors, use cases, blog and product.

XML sitemap

<image:image>

An image carried by a page, declared inside its <url> — the extension that survived while its siblings were cut back.

<image:image> wraps a single required child, <image:loc>, naming the image's URL. Google removed support for the caption, title, licence and geo_location children in 2022; the extension still parses with them and they do nothing.

A <url> may carry up to 1,000 images. They belong inside the <url> whose page shows them, not at the top of the sitemap.

Format
XML sitemap
Namespace
Google image sitemap extension
Parent
<url>
How many
Up to 1,000 per <url>.

What it contains

  • image:locrequiredAbsolute URL of the image.

Cardinality and constraints

Up to 1,000 per <url>.

  • Requires xmlns:image="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1" on the root.
  • Exactly one <image:loc> child, holding an absolute URL escaped like any other.
  • The caption, title, licence and geo_location children are no longer used by Google.

What our validator does

Extension elements are not inspected: our checks read <url>, <loc> and <lastmod>, so an image block missing its own <loc> passes.

We do not catch this one

The image block has a caption and no <image:loc>, so it names no image at all — and because our checks read only the sitemaps.org elements, it passes exactly like the corrected version below.

Broken and fixed

Both documents below are well-formed XML — that is the point of this corpus — and both are run through the validator on every test run. The verdicts here are what it returned, not what we expect it to.

broken
<?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/</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-08-10</lastmod>
    <image:image><image:caption>A hen</image:caption></image:image>
  </url>
</urlset>
No issue reported. This defect passes our checks.
fixed
<?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/</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-08-10</lastmod>
    <image:image><image:loc>https://example.com/hen.jpg</image:loc></image:image>
  </url>
</urlset>
No errors. Warnings may remain — a conforming feed can still be missing a self link — but nothing here is wrong.

Where it reaches

Related elements

All 34 elements

Get started

Bring order to the XML your team can't afford to ignore.

Create a free account and get a private workspace to search, validate, diff, and monitor your XML feeds, sitemaps, schemas, and vendor integrations.

Get started freeSign in