Sitemaps are an important resource as they allow search engines and crawlers to quickly discover the content on a site. But there are other valuable aspects on your site that search engines can benefit from as well. Images are an important element of websites and are important for search engines to have access to and take into account when ranking.
You can help Google and other search engines read and discover your images by adding an image sitemap. Image sitemaps are similar to XML sitemaps and can be submitted to help Google read the images on your page and help increase your images ranking in search results.
In order to create an image sitemap you first need to create image-specific tags to each photo on your website. Each image requires its own specific tag just as you would if you were writing unique page titles and descriptions for different pages of a website.
Creating and submitting an image sitemap can help Google and other search engines discover images they may not have otherwise found, which can help to improve the traffic from Googles images searches. Another benefit of creating an image sitemap gives you the ability to control the title and description of each image allowing you to optimize your site further