Image names and alt text lost/wiped

Shopify Discussion
1

Hello. We’ve been uploading photos to product pages and changing the name and alt text directly on the page. We thought this was the correct way for shopify. However, recently we’ve noticed that product images have been changing to names like ‘original_293….’ AND their alt text has been entirely deleted.

Looking through forums here I think maybe the name is what shopify overwrites and cannot be changed. However, I haven’t found anything about alt text being wiped. Grateful if anyone could shed light!

With thanks

3

If this is, this shouldn’t be the case even if it changes names. Because good product names are very important when it comes to seo, indexing, etc.

Other than that not aware of this, hasn’t done that manual stuff in some time now.

Best

4

Hello, thank you for responding. We are definitely saving the images, so perhaps it is the app overriding issue. We are also using Square for our POS system in the brick-and-mortar shop. Can you please explain what you mean by verify? Thank you

6

Hello webcoders! Which app would we have? We write all alt text by hand. Not sure what ‘SEO operation’ would mean. Thank you

8

Yeah that’s frustrating. Shopify can auto-rename images on upload but alt text getting wiped sounds like something else is going on, maybe a theme or app interfering. Are you adding the images through the product page editor or bulk importing them somehow?

9

Hello

I have found that there’s an app called Schema, so am trying to see if I can uninstall and reinstall to check webcoders’ suggestion. Images are getting added both ways - uploading some in bulk, with extra images added as/when we have them. I’ll update!

10

That’s frustrating. I don’t have a direct answer but a few things to check:

  1. How are you syncing data from Square? It’s possible that that could be overwriting the images
  2. If you look in Content → Files in the Shopify Admin, do you see any of the images there that still have the alt text and correct file, but that have no references? That would indicate that something is replacing the images on your products with a similar-looking image, but that doesn’t have the alt text set
  3. The alt text for an image is the same across all products that have that image. If you link the same image to two products, and change the alt text in the product detail page of product A, it will update the alt text for that same image in product B

Another idea would be to do a daily CSV export of your products in the Shopify Admin for the next couple days. Then when you see a product that has the alt text removed, look through the previous export and see a) when the ALT text disappeared and b) if the image URL for the product changed. If the image URL (everything before the ?) changed it would mean that somehow the image was replaced which would explain why there’s no alt text on the new image.