A few questions about the sitemap and how to place images in it correctly?

Question

Search Engine Optimization

I am now engaged in the generation of sitemap, here a few questions arose and I would like to ask those who know ...
Here is the standard model

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
        xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
        xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
        xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd
                             http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml http://www.w3.org/2002/08/xhtml/xhtml1-strict.xsd">
   <url>
      <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
      <lastmod>2020-01-01</lastmod>
      <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
      <priority>0.8</priority>
   </url>

1. I read that Google does not pay attention to priority at all, does it make sense to put it at all?
2. changefreq , I think for the main page and category to set "always" (news site with categories), and all articles "monthly" (comments are disabled, no changes are expected in the articles), is that right?
3. placing a picture in the search, I saw such an example

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
       xmlns:image="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1">
 <url>
   <loc>http://example.com/page.html</loc>
   <image:image>
     <image:loc>http://example.com/pic1.jpg</image:loc>
   </image:image>
 </url> 
</urlset>

That is, you can create a separate file in which, for example, pictures from articles in which they are available at all will be indicated, as I understand it?

Tell me what I think is right or wrong?

Answer 1

You can stop being masochistic and make a sitemap.txt with the following content:
url
url
...
url
Search engines take only links from the sitemap, they fill in the rest.