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Alt text at scale on Shopify: fixing 300 products without touching them one by one

By Sam Parkinson16 September 2026, updated 19 September 20265 min read

Your product photos are probably your best content. To Google Images and to anyone using a screen reader, many of them may be invisible, because large Shopify catalogues commonly accumulate missing, empty or unhelpful alt text. On a 300-product store that can be a thousand images with nothing describing them.

Alt text (the alt attribute on an image) is the short written description of what a picture shows. It does two jobs: it tells search engines what the image is, which is how you earn traffic from Google Images and image packs (Google's image guidelines name alt text as a signal), and it's read aloud to people who can't see the image, which is a genuine accessibility and legal consideration. Shopify makes it easy to skip.

What Shopify actually ships

When you upload a product image, Shopify doesn't write alt text for you. Depending on your theme and how the image was added, the alt attribute is often one of two things, and both are a problem:

• Empty. No description at all. Invisible to image search, silent to a screen reader.
• The filename. IMG_2831.jpg or DSC00042.jpg. Technically present, useless to everyone: it describes nothing and reads as gibberish aloud.

Theme and section images (banners, lookbook shots, homepage heroes) are a separate pile again, set in the theme editor rather than the product admin, and they're the ones owners forget entirely.

How to check yours

1. On a product page, right-click an image and choose Inspect. Look at the <img> tag for alt="...". Empty, or a filename, means it needs fixing.
2. For the whole store, an audit is faster than clicking through hundreds of images: it counts every image missing alt text in one pass and tells you where they are.

How to write good alt text

• Describe the image, plainly. "Grey and orange trail running shoe, side profile" beats "best waterproof shoe buy now".
• Keep it to about a sentence, roughly 125 characters. Screen readers read the whole thing; long alt text is a chore to listen to.
• Include the product context naturally where it fits, because that's also the useful search signal. The product name plus what the shot actually shows is usually right.
• Don't keyword-stuff. Stuffed alt text hurts accessibility and can read as spam. One honest description per image.
• Skip purely decorative images. A background flourish that carries no information can have empty alt (alt="") on purpose, so a screen reader passes over it. Product and content images are not decorative. The W3C alt text decision tree settles the borderline cases.

Where to set it in Shopify

• Product images: open the product, click an image in the Media area, and use Add alt text (the "ALT" button on the image). Save. Shopify's help page on alt text has the same steps for mobile.
• Theme and section images: in Online Store › Themes › Customize, most image blocks have an alt or image-description field on the section settings.

The real problem: it's a hundreds-of-boxes job

None of the above is hard. It's just a lot. Three hundred products with three or four images each is over a thousand alt fields, at maybe thirty seconds of thinking apiece. That volume is the real obstacle, not the difficulty.

Two ways through it:

• Prioritise. You don't need all thousand today. Do the homepage and top-of-funnel images first, then your best-selling and best-ranking products, then work down. The pages that get traffic earn their alt text first.
• Do it in one pass with the descriptions written for you. This is exactly what AuditTag produces: the free audit counts every image missing alt text, and the fix pack writes a specific description for each one, delivered as a sheet you paste in, describing what's really in each shot, never invented, and never touching your store.