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.

What does the Plugin do?

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.

What do I need to do?

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.

Option 1: Installing on a Self-Hosted WordPress Site

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.

Option 2: Installing on other Platforms built on WordPress

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.

Please Note: Installing a custom plugin is dependent on your particular platform’s offerings and may differ depending on subscription tiers. For example, at the time of writing Wordpress.com only supports plugin installation on the Business plan and higher. Showit only allows custom plugins on their highest subscription tier.

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 plugin is now connected to your website.

Reactivate Plugin

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.

Pic-Time Connect FAQ

Are there plans to add the plugin to other website platforms?

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

How soon will I see results on Google?

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.

Do I need to reconnect existing Pic-Time Blogs?

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

If you would like to only index specific blog posts rather than all of them, you can set this in the plugin settings page, and then manually add a flag for each Blog you want to specifically index.

From your WordPress Dashboard, select Tools > Pic-Time Connect.

In the Gallery Processing Options section, checkmark to Only include galleries marked for sitemap inclusion.

When 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:

Does this mean the Pic-Time Blogs had bad SEO rankings?

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.

Does the Plugin sitemap include images nested under the specific page URLs they belong to, or is it just a list of all image file urls?

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.