Do we need to submit another sitemap just for the images?

[edamam]

We have recipe finder website with over 500K indexed recipes. We have submitted quite many sitemaps to have them indexed, however I was wondering do we need to submit additional sitemaps just for the images?

Also any other optimization ideas for Google Images would be much appreciated.

Thanks

Lily

[irvingw]

Images can be included in the regular sitemap, or you can keep it cleaner and create a separate sitemap xml file for just images if you like, either way is fine. It might not even be necessary though if your pages are getting crawled properly and you see your images getting indexed.

Descriptive filenames is the most important thing you can do for SEO, and you could also consider watermarking your images with your website address.

[edamam]

Thanks for your answer Irving, however I dropped image optimization completely after I read some posts on the traffic drop from Google Images after the UI update in late January 2013. Apparently the traffic from there is down with ~80%, and is now not worth it.

Lily