Imagine you’re editing the alt text for product images across a site. For 240 products, each with 8 images, that’s almost 2000 clicks – a weekend (or longer) of work for a merchant. The current platform offers little to nothing to help with this kind of tedium.
Alt text for images is required. For accessibility (for screen readers), for image search SEO, for the European Accessibility Act (as of 2019) and for internal search. You can’t ignore it and you can’t do it manually. There needs to be a middle game.
There are many. We’ll go through a few major ones in this guide. Shopify restricts products to 2048 variants total, with or without Combined Listings, and also restricts product option types to 3 different kinds. Neither of these limitations interferes with using alt text in your workflow.
In this post
- Why alt text matters more than you think
- Method 1: the native admin (why it is brutal)
- Method 2: CSV export/import
- Method 3: Matrixify and bulk editors
- Method 4: AI-generated alt text
- Comparison table
- Step-by-step setup
- FAQ
Why alt text matters more than you think
Three groups of people read your alt text: accessibility screen readers, Google Images (when you want your image to show up in a web image search, for SEO), and your own AI auto-assign features when you have different variants of a product and the apps read the filename and alt text to match images to variants. If all your images have the same alt text, i.e. “IMG_2934.jpg”, all three will fail.
link to breakdown and guide covering the compliance angle, specifically the European Accessibility Act
Method 1: the native admin
Product > Media > click image > edit alt text > save. Per image. Per product. So if you have 200 products with 6 images each, that is 1200 clicks. Nobody has time.
Method 2: CSV export/import
When using shopify’s native products.csv export function, image alt text is NOT included in the products.csv file in a useable format. The csv file does include the image URL column, but the field for the alt text is not a first class field in this export. This is a known issue for some time.
Workaround: You can use the Shopify Admin GraphQL API to pull media objects and write the alt text (requires a developer). Or you can use a third-party bulk editor app that exposes image alt as a column. Which brings us to:
Method 3: Matrixify and bulk editors
Matrixify is a new WordPress plugin that helps you update image alt text for hundreds or thousands of products. It exports your products into an Excel spreadsheet with a column for image alt text, you update the alt text values in Excel, and then import the products back into Matrixify. Pricing is based on the number of products and is on the steeper side, but likely worthwhile if you have a large number of products.
Method 4: AI-generated alt text
New Vision AI models can actually render alt text from images such as product images. For example, this dress: Navy blue linen dress with wide sleeves on female model. It tends to be fairly accurate and better than what most merchants type out manually.
Bonus Point: Correcting alt text will greatly improve variant image apps (like Rubik Variant Images) to rely on AI to automatically assign the correct variant. The app appears to use the alt text as 1 of 4 data points to try to match an image with the correct variant.
For the linked-products aspect of the catalog, the product catalog plugin includes clean alt text during the AI auto-grouping process.
Comparison table
| Method | Cost | Scales to 1000+ | Dev skill needed | Quality |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Native admin | Free | No | No | Depends on you |
| GraphQL API script | Dev time | Yes | Yes | Depends on you |
| Matrixify | $20 to $200/mo | Yes | Low | Depends on you |
| AI-generated | Varies | Yes | Low | Consistent |
Step-by-step: the recommended workflow
- Audit current alt text coverage. Export a sample with Matrixify or our alt text checker tool to see what you are starting with.
- Write an alt text template: “{product name}, {color}, {angle}”. Example: “Linen dress, navy, front view”.
- For existing images, export via Matrixify. Apply the template in Excel using CONCAT formulas.
- For new uploads, name files descriptively before upload. The bulk file renamer handles SKU-based renames.
- Reimport via Matrixify. Spot check the first 10 products.
- If you run variant image filtering, open Rubik Variant Images and run AI auto-assign now that alt text is clean. The match rate jumps dramatically.
- For combined listings, run AI auto-group in Rubik Combined Listings with your clean alt text in place.
Alt text isn’t the sexiest task, but it is one of the most impactful thing you can do in a weekend. It needs to be done. Ignore this at your own peril.
Watch the walkthrough
Link to demo store, tutorial video above, documentation link in app description. Install is under a minute.
FAQ
Can I bulk edit alt text in Shopify without an app?
https://admin.shopify.com/api/graphql, https://help.shopify.com/api/graphql/custom-queries–> There is no native CSV round-trip for all image alt text.
Does Shopify export include alt text?
Not usefully. The default products CSV file does not include space for image alt text.
How long should product image alt text be?
Keep the length between 60 to 125 characters.
Does alt text affect SEO?
I’m good with the 8 signals already provided by Google Images, and signals related to a page’s overall relevance on the normal Google search results page. I feel that’s already enough. Moreover, images on websites should be accessible to people with disabilities, and that’s a legal requirement in the EU and in many states here in the US.
Can AI write alt text for me?
Yes. Vision models do a good job of generating default alt text for products from images for starting off in the right direction before mass updating. Review individual results.
Does clean alt text improve variant image auto-assign?
Yes. Rubik Variant Images uses the alt text for one of the 4 data points that gets sent to AI to match the image. Clean alt text helps to get a higher match rate.
What is the Shopify variant limit?
2048 variants per product with Combined Listings enabled, 3 option types max.
