Google only index thumb images ?

normcdn

Hi,
I have been using Coppermine for many years. Recently I discovered ZenPhoto that it is more appropriate for my recent photo album (and eventually all my photo albums). I installed the script and integrated into my website. Everything is fine with ZenPhoto.
There is something that bugs me. I use XML-Sitemaps v6.1 to create sitemaps. It works great as it indexes all my webpages and images … and even ZenPhoto images. I submitted sitemap.xml and sitemap_images.xml to Google Webmaster Tools and few days later I can see results by typing in Google image … site:cayoparedon.net
The thing I am not happy with, is Google ONLY displays thumbnails of my ZenPhoto album and not the actual images ???? In my sitemap generator configuration, I disabled files containing « _thumb » and the result is exactly what I need as you can see in … www.cayoparedon.net/sitemap_images.xml It shows the caption and filename. Perfect! BUT WHY Google picked the thumb images instead of the normal size images (500x375 pixels) in the sitemap file that I submitted ?????
Thanks for your help!

acrylian

On Zenphoto there is a difference between the sized image (on the image page and stored in /cache)) and the actual full image (stored in /albums)

How is your robots.txt setup? In earlier Zenphoto versions the included default one was pretty strict not allowing the full images or the cache. Are the images and albums really published?

Update: Your site map shows images in /images But as I can see Zenphoto is installed in http://www.cayoparedon.net/gallery/ so the images are in http://www.cayoparedon.net/gallery/albums/ actually.

In case you didn't spot Zenphoto has also its own included plugin to generate sitemaps.

normcdn

thanks,
the robots.txt in the zenphoto folder does not contains any data. However the robots.txt in my site contains links to sitemap.xml and sitemap_images.xml
I prefer sitemap generated by XML-Sitemaps v6.1 because of the caption. What you made me realized is the photos are in the albums folder, which does not reflect in the sitemap_images.xml ????
ex: in the sitemap I see ...
http://www.cayoparedon.net/gallery/14E-roads/14E-CayoParedonGrande-Camaguey-Cuba-RoadfromCayoCoco-01.jpg
which leads to the whole page of my site with the photo BUT if a add /albums/ in the same link, it will only show the image. So is it possible that Google does not recognize all the image links in my sitemap because of the missing /albums/ folder ? thanks again

acrylian

The standard sitemap generated by Zenphoto has no caption because it is not part of the specification:
http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html
However it also supports the Google images extensions:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/178636?hl=en&ref_topic=6080646

You can use what you like of course.

Regarding the url: You just learned the difference between the url of the single image page and the url of the full image itself. If your single image page does not link to the full image it of course cannot be fetched.

normcdn

I thought the caption what important in the sitemap!
ZenPhoto creates 4 files in the sitemap folder. Do I have to submit all of them ?
I want to try this ...
Remove in my existing sitemap.xml and sitemap_images.xml all references to the photoalbum and add sitemap created by ZenPhoto. Do you think it is a good idea ?
Again many thanks for your help. It is really appreciated.

acrylian

No, only the index sitemap. Put this into your Zenphoto robots.txt for example or submit it directly:
`sitemap: http://www.yourdomain.com/cache_html/sitemap/sitemapindex.xml`
This links to the individual ones. The reason for several files is that sitemaps only can have a limited number of entries so they are dividided by item type always and further if needed.

Triplemanr

I have a similar problem in that Google does not appear to have indexed my Zenphoto pages. Even if I enter the image caption as a search term nothing is found although many have been there over a month now. I have posted links to my site and Zenphoto pages on various fora including Linkedin so it is hardly isolated.

http://www.inkplusimages.com/zenstock/

acrylian

You hopefully will know that Google lists relevant sites. There are most likely sites with similar named images and with more rank already. especially these are technical names as far as I can see. A month is not that long time. (Linkedin is not really public and crawled by Google as isn't FB).

If you search our site you find lots of images so it works: https://www.google.de/search?hl=de&site=imghp&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1280&bih=903&q=site:www.zenphoto.org&oq=site:www.zenphoto.org&gs_l=img.3...997.4990.0.5282.21.6.0.15.0.0.115.458.5j1.6.0....0...1ac.1.52.img..16.5.408.xCAagODy6eg&gws_rd=ssl

All we do is allow the /cache folder and use our sitemap plugin (without the google images extra) which the robots.txt points to.

A reason might be that you don't use suffix like html or php but just the image suffix. That is technical possible but might confuse the crawler thinking this is already an image. Which it is not so it maybe rejects them as being "fake images". I have no deeper knowledge what Google does nor not.

normcdn

thanks acrylian.
I will try it and let you know!
regards,
Normand

normcdn

hi again,
I am wondering why not only published ...
sitemap-zenphoto-images-1.xml
instead of ...
sitemapindex.xml
If my only concern is Google to get all the images.

regards

acrylian

You can submit what you like. We divide it bcause there is a limit of entries per sitemap file per specification. Also Zenphoto has other items types like albums and optionally pages and news articles.

Besides on a normal site Google should very well be able to follow links even without a sitemap.

normcdn

a week later ... still waiting for Google to index the new sitemap.
Here is a capture screen of today's info ...
http://destilino.com/divers/GoogleWebTools-CayoParedon-Sitemap20140906.gif

normcdn

it has been a month since a add the sitemap in my Google Webmaster Tool and there is no image indexed as you can see in this capture screen ...
http://destilino.com/divers/GoogleWebTools-CayoParedon-Sitemap20140927.gif
usually it requires less than a week before google adds the images and also when I submit the sitemap created by ZenPhoto, there is always a « pending » action.
any clue ?
thanks!

acrylian

I am sure the reason is what I mentioned above. You are not using a modrewrite suffix for your image pages (default is `.html`). I suggested to try that but you haven't yet.

If you look at your image sitemap you see this url:
`http://cayoparedon.net/gallery/14E-roads/14E-CayoParedonGrande-Camaguey-Cuba-RoadfromCayoCoco-01.jpg`

That looks like an direct url to an image but is a page. So my guess is the Google bot mistakes it as an image and tries it as that. Then it rejects it as "php page pretending to be an image" or something since this is not meant to be direct image link anyway (for that there is the google images extension). Thus it doesn't visit the page itself where it possibly could index the image itself.

The webmaster tools probably should note something somewhere.

normcdn

very nice info about how google sees images in gallery.
about the mod_rewrite suffix, I looked in my control panel ...
Options / General / URL options and mod rewrite is checked and the mod_rewrite suffix is blank. What should I enter in the mod_rewrite suffix to fix my problem ?
Sorry I do not know much about mod_rewrite issues.
BTW in the right column it says ...
Setup did not detect a working mod_rewrite facility.
thanks

acrylian

very nice info about how google sees images in gallery.

Google just follows links and the whole is a guess as I don't know the Google internals how the bot sees what exactly. Could be that the bot is more clever and rejects for other reasons (unlikely though I think).

The modrewrite suffix is not about modrewrite issues itself. it is just to tell that the page is a page and not an image normally. it works without but by default it actually should have been `.html`. It was formerly `.php` but that triggered server security (modsecurity exactly) on some servers…You can also use non suffixes like `-view` for example.

Setup did not detect a working mod_rewrite facility.

Then your server reports something wrong as your site is clearly having it as you use the url.
http://www.zenphoto.org/news/zenphoto-url-structure