Product image alt text bug (alt text values gone in UI, but present in export)

[Corey_Fein]

For some reason there is a chunk of products uploaded via API in a period in 2020 (sometime in March 2020 through sometime in August 2020, I think) where the alt text suddenly appears to have vanished. When I click the images in the product in the Shopify admin, the alt text isn't there. Our theme uses the alt text to decide which images to show the customer, and for these products, the images do not work. When I added the alt text manually to one product, it started working again.

I wanted to figure out which products had this issue, so I exported all products to see which images had no alt text. To my surprise, every product image did have the alt text show up in the export, even the ones where the alt text is not present in the admin UI/where the images don't load properly on the site. So the alt text is definitely stored somewhere, just not correctly.

All of the products were uploaded using an old script that we've since stopped using. Our new product creation script that uses a newer version of the API works fine, as does CSV import. Products created before March of 2020 used the same old script, but don't seem to be affected. And this issue did not happen immediately -- the affected products were all working throughout last year, until recently.

I found a discussion from 2013 that seems like a similar if not identical issue: https://community.shopify.com/c/shopify-discussions/alt-text-gone/m-p/84453

Shopify was able to fix it soon after that person posted. I'm hoping to get to the bottom of this so that I don't have to recreate all these products from scratch. 

@Shopify -- I also spoke on the phone with someone and emailed details. The ticket number is 28909398.

[YanniCA]

Its 2025 and this is STILL an issue present in shopify, it has not been fixed