It is shocking that Shopify doesn’t have a built-in feature that automatically populates the Alt text field for images using descriptions from Photoshop or any other external source. You would need to manually enter the Alt text for each image when uploading them to your Shopify store. Our store has nearly 3000 assets that we have to manually add Alt text descriptions. Please add this ability and be part of the solution for ADA internet users (42.5 million users in the U.S. according to Pew Research Center). The current process is too cumbersome and shop users are just not going to utilize the manual process. I can imagine California spinning up a class-action lawsuit in no time.
For future readers, here are the steps to add Alt text to images in Shopify:
-
Login to Your Shopify Admin: Log in to your Shopify admin panel.
-
Go to Products or Pages: Depending on where you want to add Alt text (e.g., product images or page images), navigate to the relevant section in your Shopify admin.
-
Edit Product or Page: Select the product or page for which you want to add Alt text, and click on the “Edit” button.
-
Add Alt Text to Images: In the product or page editor, locate the image you want to add Alt text to. You should see an “Alt” text field associated with each image. Enter your descriptive Alt text in this field.
-
Save Changes: After adding the Alt text, make sure to save your changes.
Unfortunately, Shopify does not currently offer a direct integration with Adobe Photoshop or any other image editing software to automate the population of Alt text fields. Alt text is a crucial part of web accessibility, so it’s essential to take the time to manually add descriptive and meaningful Alt text for each image to ensure accessibility for all users.
I reached out to Shopify support and they said this:
I appreciate your patience with me on this! I found a few options that we can use for you to be able to upload your photos without doing them 1 by 1. As I mentioned earlier, as of the moment we won’t be able to use the image metadata yet to autopopulate of the images on the store. With these apps that I’ve found for you, you can upload your images without having to add them to the products 1 by 1.> > Hextom: Bulk Image Edit & SEO> > Tiny:SEO Image optimizer,Speed> > BOOSTER SEO & IMAGE OPTIMIZER
UPDATE I can confirm that the recommended apps from support can NOT help:
Hextom: Bulk Image Edit & SEO:
No, unfortunately our app does not have this feature.
Tiny:SEO Image optimizer,Speed:
No, our app does not do that sadly.
1 Like
BOOSTER SEO & IMAGE OPTIMIZER also can NOT help but did shed some more light on the issue:
“Shopify does not allow apps to access the SEO data in your Shopify admin. So our app only overrides your SEO tags including alt texts by adding them directly to your site’s source codes.”
I built an automation workflow with our app in order to generate alt text using an image AI API called replicate.com:
Do you think that might be a solution here?
I don’t believe that’s accurate. There is an API call to update product image alt text which we are using in the workflow automation example I posted.
Hi Wow! I didnt know you could do that, love it! The images we upload, already have alt text embedded in the photo. Our company is primarily B2B through a non-shopify site, and I run the Shopify site. The images are used for both so I don’t need to write anything new, although I love the idea of integrating GPT. Let me have my team run through your solution and I’ll report back.
1 Like
Hi Andrew, we’ve recently introduced Caseo.ai for Shopify, designed specifically to address this challenge. You can explore it on the Shopify app store at https://apps.shopify.com/caseo-ai-seo-assistant. Our app solution employs advanced AI image recognition combined with your own product data to generate pertinent and contextual image descriptions.
Awesome sounds good. Might be worth looking at the microsoft cloud vision API if you already have the image embedded in the text. I’d be happy to work up a demo for you if you wanted to shoot me an image or two to test on.
Are you saying that your app will read our image’s meta data’s Alt text for ADA and put it in Shopify’s ADA alt text section?
We leverage OpenAI to analyze images for contextual details, and then merge this with the product data.
Try it out with 10 free image credits on us:
Caseo AI SEO Assistant on Shopify
OK, but we already have the ADA alt text impeded in out images. We’re not looking for an a.i solution here. Does your app read our image’s meta data’s Alt text for ADA and put it in Shopify’s ADA alt text section? In your first post, it sounded like you do, but in your second post it just sounds like you are posting to sell your app and not answering my question.
Hi Andrew, I understand the need now. Let me speak to the team to see if this would be possible to read the data from the meta data.
Our app analyzes each product image with a vision AI that returns metadata that we filter and pass to a different AI that writes SEO and ADA-optimized alt text in Shopify’s admin. Test it out, I’d like to explore solving this issue for you.
Thank you for offering a solution, but it is not the one we are asking for. Your solution still requires my team to double our workload. If we use an app, we still need to double-check things for accuracy. We might as well just copy/past the ADA work already done that is embedded into the file. We’re hoping to cut down a task. We’re still searching.
Totally agree this should be more automated at the platform level, especially given ADA and general accessibility expectations now. Until Shopify ships something native, the closest workaround is to have alt text generated in bulk and then stored on the image or product record. Some apps can already do this by “reading” the image and producing a concise description instead of just copying product titles. For example, Naper AI has an Image Alt Text generator that runs across product, collection and theme images so you are not stuck doing this one by one.
