If you’re using Pic-Time’s Blogs feature to create blog posts from your galleries and embed them into your website, the Pic-Time Connect plugin will help ensure those images are better indexed by search engines. This improves your SEO and makes your work more discoverable online.

The Plugin adds all embedded assets (photos, GIFs, slideshows, etc.) to the parent website's sitemap.xml, which can potentially improve SEO, so we recommend adding it.

Simply install the plugin to your website, and that’s it! There are two ways to install the WordPress plugin, depending on how your website is set up. Both options are detailed below.

If you self-host a website using WordPress.org:

1. Log in to your WordPress dashboard, and go to Plugins > Add Plugin.

2. Search for Pic-Time Connect and select it.

3. Click Install and activate.

4. You’ll then see Pic-Time Connect in your list of Installed Plugins and will be automatically activated. If it’s not, simply click to reactivate the plugin.

And that’s it! The plugin is now connected to your website.

If your website is not self-hosted and runs on a platform built on WordPress (For example, StyleCloud, WordPress.com, or Showit) follow the steps below.

1. First download the plugin. Click here to view the Pic-Time Connect plugin in the WordPress Plugin Directory and click on the Download button to download the plugin .zip file.

2. Then, log in to your WordPress dashboard, and go to Plugins > Add Plugin.

3. Click the Upload button.

4. Drag and drop or click to select the downloaded plugin .zip file.

5. You’ll then see Pic-Time Connect in your list of Installed Plugins and will be automatically activated. If it’s not, simply click to reactivate the plugin.

And that’s it! The Pic-Time Connect Plugin is now connected to your website. Follow the steps here if you need to reactivate the Plugin, and follow the steps here if you need to check the compatibility with other SEO Plugins.

If needed, you can deactivate and reactivate your plugin under Plugins > Installed Plugins. Locate Pic-Time Connect and click to Activate. For example, if you uploaded and installed the plugin yourself, you may need to click to activate it.

Under Plugins > Installed Plugins, locate Pic-Time Connect and click to see the Settings.

If you have other SEO Plugins activated, Pic-Time Connect will detect them. Click to Test Integration Now.

If the Pic-Time sitemap can’t be located within other SEO Plugins, you can manually add the Pic-Time sitemap to the robots.txt file. Follow the instructions depending on your SEO Plugin to add the Pic-Time sitemap URL, checkmark I have manually added the sitemap and click Save & Mark as Resolved.

You’ll then see a status at the top of the page that the SEO Integration is Active.

To find different Sitemap URLs, locate the Sitemap Information section in the Plugin Settings.

If you do not have any other SEO Plugins activated, your Sitemap Information may look like this:

If you do have other SEO Plugins activated, your Sitemap Information may look like this:

On the right hand side of the Pic-Time Connect Plugin Settings, you’ll see the Scan Status. This will scan all of your WordPress posts. If the system detects any issues, it will appear in the Scan Issues section, and if it’s related to a Pic-Time Blog, you’ll see a note that the issue is “with gallery ID”.

Pic-Time Connect will automatically scan every few days, but you can also click to Scan All Posts Now.

A progress bar will appear at the top of the page until the scan is complete.

There are three ways you can choose to have Pic-Time Connect manage your Blog posts:

If you would like to include or exclude specific blog posts rather than all of them, after updating the Gallery Inclusion Mode, you can manually add a code for each Blog you want to specifically index.

To include specific Blogs: when Include only marked galleries is enabled, after pasting your Blog Integration Code, copy this attribute:

data-pt-sitemap="true"

and paste it at the end of the Blog Integration Code to include the Blog in the sitemap, as shown below:

To exclude specific Blogs: when Exclude only marked galleries is enabled, after pasting your Blog Integration Code, copy this attribute:

data-pt-sitemap="excluded"

and paste it at the end of the Blog Integration Code to include the Blog in the sitemap, as shown below:

If you have other SEO Plugins, you can choose how the Pic-Time Connect Plugin works in conjunction with them:

Under Debug Logging, make sure Enable debug logging is checkmarked. This will automatically log all Pic-Time Connect operations if they need to be referenced later on for troubleshooting.

If you don’t see any Pic-Time entries in the sitemap index, you can click to Check Robots.txt Status Now. This will check for a physical file. If there is a physical file detected and it can be modified, another button labeled Attempt to Add Entries will appear that you can click on to attempt to update the physical and virtual robots.txt.

If that doesn’t resolve the issue, click Run Diagnostic & Force Add.

Your Diagnostic Results will show the status of the physical and virtual robots.txt files (please note that you don’t necessarily need an existing physical file), and any recommendations to resolve the issue. If there aren’t any issues, you’ll see the message “WordPress filter is working! Your sitemaps are being added dynamically.”

If there are unresolved issues, click to View Manual Troubleshooting Guide.

In the Robots.txt Manual Troubleshooting Guide, click General Troubleshooting (All Sites), then select the other SEO Plugin you’re using, and choose your specific platform host.

This will generate specific instructions based on what you selected, but in general, you can simply locate your robots.txt file, click to Copy URLs from the troubleshooting instructions, and paste them into the robots.txt file through either your FTP/File Manager, your other SEO Plugin, or the cPanel.

When you’re done following the instructions, click on the X in the top right corner to close out of the troubleshooting guide, and click Save Settings to save any changes you’ve made.

Yes! We have plans to implement this for other platforms in the future.

The sitemap is created right away, however, the actual indexing done by Google may take up to several weeks, so you may not see immediate results.

If you’d like the indexing to be done more quickly, go to Google Search Console to submit your Pic-Time image sitemap directly. Learn more here.

Nope! Just install the Pic-Time Connect Plugin, and it will automatically index all Pic-Time Blogs on your site.

No, but the Plugin is focused on improving SEO with WordPress hosts after a recent change in Google’s Indexing process, so you may see an improvement in your rankings.

The sitemap includes the images’ urls nested under the specific pic-time blog post url.

The plugin goes through all website pages and looks for the Blog Integration code (specifically, the Pic-Time <scripts> and HTML code blocks). Once located, it extracts its URL and calls the server to get the blog’s images and assets.

Yes! The plugin should work seamlessly with other SEO plugins enabled.