How to add alt text to all images in Shopify

Home › Guides › Shopify alt text·Updated September 2026

A store with 200 products is a store with something like 900 images. Product shots, variant swatches, lifestyle photos, collection banners, the logo, whatever the homepage slideshow is doing this month. Almost none of them have alt text, because alt text is the box you skip when you are trying to get a product live before the weekend.

Shopify makes this harder than WordPress does, for one reason that catches nearly everyone. Your alt fields can be empty in the admin while your storefront still shows alt text in the page code. So you check a product page, see descriptions everywhere, and conclude the job is done. It is not. Start there, because it changes what you need to fix.

Why your images look like they already have alt text

Most Shopify themes are written so that if an image has no alt text saved, the theme prints the product title instead. It is a sensible default. A screen reader gets something rather than nothing.

The catch is what it produces at scale. Open a collection page where nobody has filled the alt fields and you get forty images whose descriptions are forty product titles, repeated word for word from the link text right beside them. For a shopper using a screen reader, every product is announced twice. For Google, the image adds no information the page did not already have. The images are not broken, they are just invisible, which is the harder problem to notice.

Some theme sections go the other way and print an empty alt attribute no matter what you typed in the admin. Banners and slideshow images are the usual offenders. Either way, the admin is not telling you the truth about your storefront, so check the storefront.

Two ways to do that. Right-click a product or collection page, choose View Page Source, and search for alt= to see what is actually being sent. Or paste the URL into our free alt text checker, which reads the rendered page and lists what each image is carrying, including the ones that came out as a filename.

The five places Shopify stores alt text

Fixing the product catalogue and stopping there is the second common mistake. These are all separate fields, and none of them fills in any of the others.

Product media

Every image on a product, including the variant images. This is the bulk of your store and the only group the CSV route can reach.

Collection images

The photo attached to a collection, which usually appears as the header on the category page and again in any collection list. High traffic pages, and they are edited one at a time under Products, Collections.

Theme images

Banners, slideshows, promo tiles, the logo, the favicon, anything placed through the theme editor. These live in your theme settings rather than in the product data, so no product export will ever see them.

Blog and page images

Images inside blog posts and standard pages, added through the rich text editor. The alt text is set in the editor when you insert or click the image.

Files

Content, Files holds every image uploaded to the store, including ones no page uses any more. Alt text saved here travels with the file, which is why it is worth checking after you accept any suggested description.

Quick answer: pick by how you want to spend the time

• A handful of images, and you know what to say: the admin field. It is right there and it saves in a click.
• Just the thumbnails, quickly: the bulk editor. It puts your products in a spreadsheet view inside the admin, but it only reaches the first image of each one.
• A full catalogue, and you are happy in a spreadsheet: the CSV export and import. Free, no app, and it handles thousands of rows in one go. You still write every line.
• A full catalogue, and you would rather review than write: a generator drafts the descriptions and you edit the ones that matter. Editing a sentence takes seconds. Writing one from an empty box is the reason the fields are empty in the first place.

Store size is not really the deciding factor. Thirty blank alt fields is still thirty blank alt fields. They are not blank because the catalogue got big, they are blank because describing a photo of a mug is dull and never feels urgent.

Method 1: The alt text field in the admin

Go to Products, open the product, and click a media item to open its preview. Click Add alt text, type the description, and click Save alt text. Shopify allows up to 512 characters here and recommends 125 or fewer.

Shopify’s media editor may also offer a suggested description when it opens an image that has none. Accept it, edit it, or replace it. The suggestion is written from the picture on its own, so it will describe a white ceramic mug accurately and have no idea it is your bestselling camping mug sold in a set of four. Read before you accept, and fix the ones where the product matters.

For collection images, open the collection and use Edit alt text under the Image section. For theme images, go to Online Store, Themes, Customize, click the section holding the image, and look for the alt text field in the settings panel. Both are worth doing by hand. There are maybe twenty of them, and they sit on your highest traffic pages.

Method 2: The bulk editor

Select several products in the Products list, click Edit products, then use Columns to add an image alt text column to the spreadsheet view. You can then type down the column instead of opening each product.

Useful, with one real limit: where the column is available it covers the featured image only. The other six photos on that product are untouched. On a clothing store, where the detail shots and the on-model shots are the images people actually zoom into, that leaves most of the work undone. Treat the bulk editor as a way to clear your main product thumbnails quickly, not as the answer.

Method 3: The CSV export and import

This is the free route that genuinely scales, and Shopify’s own documentation points you at it. Go to Products, click Export, and choose all products as a CSV. Open the file in Google Sheets or Excel. Each image is its own row, and the column you want is Image Alt Text.

Three things make this go smoothly:

• Keep only the columns you need. Handle, Image Src and Image Alt Text are enough to identify each image and update it. Fewer columns means fewer chances to overwrite something by accident.
• Sort or filter by blank alt text so you are working through the images that need you rather than scrolling past the ones that are done.
• Tick the overwrite option on import. Products are matched by handle, and without that box your edits are ignored.

Two traps worth knowing before you press import. If the Product Image URL column is present but empty on a row, an overwriting import will wipe that image from the product, so never delete the values from that column while leaving the header in place. And if an image URL in your file points at the Files area of your own store, Shopify redownloads it and you end up with a duplicate copy in the products folder. Export the file, edit the alt text column, leave the image URLs exactly as they came out, and neither one bites.

The honest downside of CSV is that it is a one-off. You write 900 descriptions in a spreadsheet, import them, and then you do the whole cycle again after your next product drop. It also cannot touch collection, theme or blog images, because they are not product data.

Method 4: Let a generator write the first draft

This flips the job from writing to reviewing. A vision model looks at each image and writes a plain, accurate sentence, and you correct the ones that need your judgment. You still decide the final wording. You are just not starting from an empty box 900 times.

You know your products better than any model does, and on the images that carry real meaning, a size chart, a fabric close-up, a photo where the point is the stitching, you should edit the draft. Most images in a store are not like that. A packshot on a white background needs an accurate description, not a carefully written one, and that is the part worth handing off.

There are two kinds of tool here, and the difference matters more on Shopify than anywhere else.

Apps you install in the store

These connect to your product data and write the alt text back into Shopify for you, so there is nothing to import afterwards. That is the convenient part, and for a catalogue-only cleanup it is a short route.

The limit is what they can see. An app reading your product images sees the file and the product record. It does not see the collection page where that photo is the fourth of forty, or the landing page you built for the summer sale. It also works through everything in the account, including images from products you archived two seasons ago.

Crawlers that read your live store

A tool such as Image SEO Lab opens your storefront the way a shopper does, so it sees each image on the page where it is actually used, theme banners and collection headers included. That matters more than it sounds on an ecommerce site. The same photo can need different alt text in different places. On the product page it can describe the detail, because the title and price are right there. On a collection page full of similar products, the same photo needs to say which one this is.

Image SEO Lab reads the page around each image, including the page title, the heading and the text near it, and writes the description to match. It only looks at images that are on your live pages, and it gives you a title, alt text, caption and description for each one, exported as a CSV or a spreadsheet you can paste into the Image Alt Text column.

So the trade-off is straightforward. An app saves you the import step. A crawler gives you descriptions written for the page the image sits on, and covers the theme and collection images that product-based tools never see. Nothing to install either way, but with a crawler you do the paste yourself.

What Google’s August 2026 update means for this

Google confirmed a spam update on 18 August 2026 and finished rolling it out on the 21st. It was not a core update, but it moved rankings more than most, and one rank-tracking study put top-ten URLs at roughly 1.8 times the usual risk of dropping out of the top 100 that week.

The target was scaled content abuse, which is Google’s term for churning out pages mainly to win rankings rather than to help anyone. Two details are worth holding on to. First, the policy is about the result, not the tool: mass-produced human writing is judged the same way as mass-produced AI writing. Second, Google has been consistent that AI assistance is fine when a person reviews the output and the result is genuinely useful.

Applied to a Shopify store, that gives you three practical rules:

• Do not repeat one line across the catalogue. Setting every image to the product title, or to Buy handmade leather wallets online, is the pattern this update is looking for.
• Do not stuff keywords. Alt text is read aloud to people. If it does not read as a sentence a human would say, it is doing you harm and not much good.
• Review what a tool drafts. Skim everything, edit the images where being wrong would matter. That review is the difference between assisted content and the thing Google is filtering.

None of this is a reason to leave the fields blank. Blank alt text has never ranked anything, and it fails every shopper using a screen reader.

How to write alt text for a product image

Whether you write it or edit a draft, the same short rules apply. Knowing them is what lets you spot a weak description in half a second while reviewing.

• Describe what a shopper would want to know. Colour, material, shape, what it is doing in the shot. Navy merino wool crew neck jumper, folded to show the ribbed cuff.
• Give each photo of the same product a different line. Seven images, seven angles, seven descriptions. That is the whole point of having seven images.
• One sentence, roughly 80 to 125 characters. Long enough to be useful, short enough that a screen reader reads it in full.
• Drop "image of" and "photo of". A screen reader already says it is an image. Those words just eat the character count.
• Leave decorative images empty. A divider, a background texture, a spacer. Give those an empty alt attribute so assistive tech skips them rather than reading out something pointless.

Same product, three versions, for the third photo on a wallet listing:

• Blank: the theme prints Handmade Leather Wallet, which the page already said twice.
• Stuffed: leather wallet mens wallet handmade wallet buy leather wallet uk
• Good: Tan leather wallet held open to show six card slots and a note pocket.

Check what actually changed

After an import or an app run, spot-check the storefront rather than the admin. Open a product page and a collection page, view the source, and search for alt=. You are looking for two things: the descriptions you wrote showing up, and no leftover rows where the theme fell back to the product title.

Our alt text checker does the same read for any URL you give it, which is quicker across a few pages. Running WordPress alongside your store, on a blog or a separate site? The WordPress version of this guide covers the same ground for the media library.

Frequently asked questions