Sitemap and Graphics

I'm using the Google sitemap creator, which is server-side and pretty much goes through everything. I noticed that if you don't filter out the images, it'll add those to the sitemap file as well.

So my question is: is it good to let it add image URLs to the sitemap or is that just a waste of time and bandwidth? I have a bunch of images that I wouldn't mind seeing pop up in Google Image Search. I don't know if they detect images automatically on page crawls or if including them in the sitemap (or maybe creating a separate sitemap for images only) helps with the indexing there.

Any info or tips would be appreciated.

 

If your image files have a meaningful name, I mean woman_face.jpg and not 56255gh.jpg, then it is probably a good idea. If the images have not this kind of name then Google won't be able to show them for a related search.

 

You should check in Google webmasters tools for errors in your sitemap file. Goolge usually tells you about the errors if they are. If there is no errors or inaccuracies you can let the matter rest.

But as I know sitemap protocol means only for pages. There is a special protocol for videos but not for images.

 

Thanks for the reply. I have an image related site, so the graphic files are all very well named. A couple of my images pop up on Google Image, but not as many as I'd like there to be.

Edit: Thanks for the reply Sench. I frequent the Google Webmasters tool a lot. There are not many errors on my sitemap. Just a couple duplicate title pages and such. If it's not for images, then I'll leave them out. The reason I asked is because one of the free sitemap programs I tried (VIGOS Gsitemap, I think) made a map with page URLs and image URLs. I use the Google script that works on the server and always filtered the images out of the map. After seeing that tool include images into the map, I wondered if that was "ok" with Google and if would help get more of my images into Google Images.