Hi @davidki ,
When search engines crawl your post content, they’ll see both text and images. If there’s nothing wrong with your page, then the text and image are likely to be indexed.
The sitemap is a tool to help the search engines crawl the content better, by providing all the URLs of the posts and images. So search engines unlikely to miss them. Note that without sitemaps, they still can crawl your website by going from one URL to others.
So, as long as you still output images in your post content, excluding them from the sitemap is probably useless. For that reason, we don’t implement a way to exclude them.
If you really don’t want those images to be crawled and indexed by search engines, it’s best to not use them in the post content at all.