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I've been successfully submitting xml sitemaps to Google using cURL.
The URL is http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=

The problem is that XML sitemaps take several days to be processed, and pictures take a lot more time or can never be indexed at all.

When I manually submit a URL at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url, it is indexed in less than a minute, but the pictures it links to are not.

Is there a way to programmatically submit a single URL AND its images to Google without using a XML sitemap?

EDIT

Here's an example result, after using the manual tool:
enter image description here

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    So you want to hurry Google up huh? Do you think this is wise?? (humor) You do not have to resubmit sitemaps at all. Google checks them periodically. More importantly, if Google is able to crawl your site, then it is extremely likely that Google is just using your sitemap for auditing. As well, do not count on what you see in the Search Console as being anything accurate. It is often several days behind and the metrics regarding pages indexed by your sitemap rarely if ever matches reality. Not even close. Just leave it alone. It will all work out. I promise. Don't be a nervous hen.
    – closetnoc
    Commented Apr 3, 2016 at 22:35
  • I'm not trying to hurry up things in any way. There is indeed a difference from a minute to days between submitting a sitemap and manually submitting a url. Google accepts both ways. Maybe there is a google api which will accept such a single url request.
    – Robin LeBon
    Commented Apr 3, 2016 at 22:42
  • If you are submitting a sitemap, then you do not have to - assuming it is the same file name. Again, the sitemap does not mean that pages will be indexed faster. This is especially true for a site that Google can crawl.
    – closetnoc
    Commented Apr 3, 2016 at 22:59
  • Sorry, I forgot to mention that I no longer want to submit sitemaps. My fault.
    – Robin LeBon
    Commented Apr 3, 2016 at 23:05
  • "indexed in less than a minute" - You can actually go to Google search, do an arbitrary search and find your page... in less than a minute?
    – MrWhite
    Commented Apr 4, 2016 at 7:49

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Unfortunately there is no way to submit a single URL using cURL or anything automated such as what you are suggesting and there is no way to speed up the indexing process for either the content or the images. Neither sitemap submission nor manual URL submission guarantee the content will be added to the index. With the manual fetch it can update the index a lot faster as it doesn't need to be queued, you have done something and it is doing it then returns the results to you so Google kills two birds with one stone and uses the same process to index as required, however the sitemap submission simply goes through the sitemap file and adds each URL it finds to the queue of URL's to be indexed by Google, and Googlebot will index them at the appropriate time based on where they are in the queue and the formula Google uses to decide how frequently to index a given site and a given page.

Unfortunately for your use case you will simply need to keep on submitting the sitemap using cURL unless you want to run of a list and enter each URL manually into the fetch tool. Either way the image indexing won't be any faster as it takes a while for Google to figure out the keywords to apply to an image and the caption and page content is only part of the way Google comes up with the keywords to attach to the image.

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