I had been using the generator for just my site's web pages and assumed it was configured properly since the page count appeared close. I also had it configured to use my robots.txt file so the resulting sitemap looked like what I expected.
Recently I decided I wanted to include images that were embedded as part of my site's forums as they are located in a common directory on the server. I first tried simply allowing the path in the robots.txt file but the image count was significantly lower than the total images in that directory. I then decided to disable the robots.txt which meant I had to be more granular and add much more information in the Exclude URLs box since the target directory was inside another directory with other data and directories. I also had to add strings to prevent duplicate pages due to different query string values used by SMF. A few runs later and I no longer had duplicates in the sitemap, but the indexed image count only increased by 5 images which is about 50 short of all the images that should be indexed. In addition, my webpage count increased by 100 pages - does this mean all the time before this change in configuration the generator wasn't spidering properly?
I could use some troubleshooting advice on how to get the generator to index all the linked images from the forums. I confirmed their appearance in the forums as I manually added alt tags to 95%+ of the embedded images so appropriate captions would be added to the image sitemap.