Feature: Native support for IPTC/XMP Metadata to automate Alt Text

Shopify Discussion
1

Hello Shopify Community and Product Team,

I am writing to propose an enhancement to how Shopify handles image uploads to improve both merchant productivity and digital accessibility.

Currently, Shopify appears to use AI to automatically generate alt text for uploaded images. While this is a helpful safety net, AI-generated descriptions often lack the specific context that a merchant or photographer has already embedded into the file.

I am advocating for Shopify to natively extract image metadata — specifically the IPTC AltTextAccessibility and XMP dc:description fields — to support the concept of #AltAtSource.

During the upload process, the logic should be:

  1. Priority 1: Use embedded IPTC / XMP accessibility metadata if present.

  2. Priority 2: Use Shopify’s AI to generate a draft only if no metadata exists.

I recently conducted a test using a professional press image from a major news agency. The image contained highly specific metadata:

  • The embedded metadata contained: “United States’ Emily Infeld, center, gets ready to start in the Women’s 10,000 meters final during the World Athletics Championships in London Saturday, Aug. 5, 2017.”

  • Shopify’s AI generated: “Athletes on a track with Toyota branding”

While the AI draft is technically accurate, it misses the vital context — the athlete’s name, the event, and the location — that is already “portable” within the file. By reading the metadata first, Shopify would provide merchants with high-quality, professional descriptions instantly, saving significant time on manual edits.

The goal of the #AltAtSource campaign is to make accessibility “portable” so that when an image moves from a professional camera to a platform like Shopify, the accessibility information travels with it. You can read more about the campaign and our open letter to CMS vendors here:

Other platforms in the CMS space — such as Craft CMS and WordPress — are already moving toward this standard. We are also in an open dialogue with the Drupal community, who have expressed a keen interest in supporting the campaign. As a leader in e-commerce, Shopify has a massive opportunity to join this collective effort and lead the way in “accessibility by default.”

I would love to hear from the community and the Shopify team on the feasibility of prioritising metadata extraction over AI-generated drafts.

3

Yes please! I am so surprised that Shopify doesn’t already do this. My store needs a lot of highly detailed pictures, and I want to be very intentional about how I fill in this data for my SEO as well ass agent discoverability. I can already set the Alt-Text metadata from whithin lightroom while I’m editing my photos, and it’s a huge pain in the neck to have to do it all over again outside once I upload all my images. Please, adding this capability will be a great relief to my workflow.