I think I'll try an Wordpress image sitemap plugin. Just unsure if I should also no-index the slideshow pages, since duplicate meta might be a problem...

Thanks for the thorough answer, Andy. Why wouldn't you suggest trying to get slideshow images indexed? For us, the slideshow images are high quality, unique visual assets.

I'm managing a design blog hosted on WordPress. Each "design project" article includes a slideshow with additional images (and captions) for the project - these are images and text not found in the article itself.

Every slide has the same page path as the article, but a different query param at the end. So if the article is /article the first slide would be /article?slide=1 for example.

I'm having two issues:

1. The slideshow images don't seem to be getting indexed.
2. Screaming Frog reports duplicate meta descriptions and title tags for each slideshow page (same meta as article).

I want to do what's best overall from an SEO perspective. Having the slideshow images show in Google image search is a must. And having the captions indexed might help too? But I want the Google image results linking to the article and not the individual slideshow pages. And I don't want duplicate meta issues.

What's the best thing to do? Submit a sitemap that lists both article and slideshow images? "Rel canonical" the param'd slideshow urls to the base article url (not sure this makes total sense, since slide content is different from the article)? Get rid of slideshow altogether and put images in body? Some combo of these?

Hopefully this makes sense. Any thoughts appreciated!