Some background
I've recently switched to the new next/image component for a larger project. Overall I was pretty happy with it - however then we've realized that all the images that are part of the site are not indexed anymore by google image search. As google image search is a source of traffic to our site I was wondering what the options are here to get google to index the images again.

• First, I through it had to do with lazy loading and that the images do not show up when google renders the page. However after investigating and running puppeteer like described in this guide the images seem to load properly.
• Then I read that "google only indexes images with proper URLs". I tried to dig into this a bit more but couldn't find-out for sure that this is the issue.

Ideas for solutions
This is - depending on the device of course - how the image tags are loaded. As I understand the issue is that the src urls are "proper urls" for the google crawler and thus not indexed for image search.

<img
  title="Title of the image"
  alt="some image"
  src="/_next/image?url=%2Fstatic%2Fimages%2Fsomeimage.png&amp;w=1920&amp;q=75"
  decoding="async"
/>

As I understand the issue I have two possible solution to get google to properly index the images:

1. I can remove image optimization (stop using next/image) and basically go back to plain old html with static unoptimized image urls. This would again have drawbacks for webvitals, loading times, ...
2. I can generate an image source map that contains the static unoptimized image urls. As far as I can tell this is not possible out of the box and would mean either manually maintaining the source map or writing some custom code to generate it from the project.

Does anyone else run into a similar issue? I just found this thread on reddit but the answers are not to helpful.