How can I get a photo album indexed by Google?

[jasny]

We have a lot of photos on our website. Unfortunately most of them don't seem to be indexed by Google.

We run a party website. One of the things we do, is take pictures at events and put them on the site. An event page with a photo album, can have anywhere between 100 and 750 photo's. For each foto's there is a thumbnail on the page. The thumbnails are lazy loaded by showing a placeholder and loading the picture right before it comes onscreen. There is no pagination of infinite scrolling. Thumbnails don't have an alt text.

Each thumbnail links to a picture page. This page only shows the base HTML structure (menu, etc), the image and a close button. The image has a src attribute with full size image, a srcset with several sizes for responsive design and an alt text. There is no real textual content on an image page.

(Note that when a user clicks on the thumbnail, the large image is loaded using JavaScript and we mimic the page change. I think it doesn't matter, but am unsure.)

I'd like that full size images should be indexed by Google and found with Google image search. Thumbnails should not be indexed (or ignored). Unfortunately most pictures aren't found or their thumbnail is shown.

Moz is giving telling me that all the picture pages are duplicate content (19,521 issues), as they are all the same with the exception of the image. The page title isn't the same but similar for all images of an album.

Example: On the "A day at the park" event page, we have 136 pictures. A site search on "a day at the park" foto, only reveals two photo's of the albums.

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[GastonRiera]

Yeap, google should be crawling all your site naturaly.
Remember that bots have a finite time to crawl your site. It might be that there not enogh time for all yout images.
Even more, if you want to be stric with only high res images indexed, that's the main reason to use sitemaps.

And yes again, use different sitemaps, ona for images and one for pages.

[jasny]

The website has 228,687 pictures (and thus so many picture pages). In total it has about 600,000 pages. That's way to much for a simple static sitemap.

I am considering generating sitemaps and using multiple site maps. Than I can put a noindex on the picture pages and add list the photo's as part of the event page, as show in this guide.

However, I feel that I really shouldn't have to as Google should be able to crawl my site naturally.

[GastonRiera]

Hi there,

Have you tried telling google to index your images is by a sitemap_images.xml. There you can specify exactly what image to index.

Im not seeing any sitemap in https://www.fiestainfo.com/sitemap.xml

Best luck.
GR.