20 Jun 2021, 11:30
So, while I'm waiting for the sitemap fix, I tried something different.
Part of the reason for the crawlers to not visit the individual images (and then indexing them) is the lack of internal links when using the javascript popup. That popup looks great and it would be a shame to not use it.
One fix that could help would be an accurate sitemap including all the individual images. The dev is working on that. ETA: when it's ready. perfectly fine.
In the meantime, I addressed the lack of internal links. In my case, all the galleries are located inside a unique folder: Albums.
For each final album with the photos, I tweaked X3 to automatically add and cache a list of those photos at the extreme bottom in the footer. these are very basic hard links using the image title (or file name if there is no title) to link the individual image page without the popup.
I already noticed the crawlers touching a few of these these images. It isn't really pretty, but shouldn't disturb the visitor. Will know a a couple weeks if that has any effect on google indexing my photos.