Image naming

[NSG]

WordPress has a space in the image section for alt text, title, caption, and description.

If I name a photo: "green apples in a bucket.jpg" it uploads to WP as

• file name: green-apples-in-a-bucket.jpg
• title: green apples in a bucket

A few questions:

• Should the file name and the title ever be different?
• Does it matter if the alt text is the same as the title? (assuming it makes sense)
• Is a description important to complete?
• Would it ever be ok to upload photo names such as: green-apples-in-a-bucket1.jpg, green-apples-in-a-bucket2.jpg, etc and then rename the title field in WP? Or should each photo name be unique?

Most articles have 10-30 images and I'm beginning to wonder if they are named correctly or if I'm missing out on additional search traffic.

 

[Ryuzaki]

I think that you're over-thinking it. What you don't want to do is over-optimize to a point where a year later you realize you need to go back and undo a ton of work. You won't be able to rename files that are already uploaded easily.

And that's my first recommendation. I wouldn't have 15 images in an article all with the same title and a number sequence after them (green-apples-1, green-apples-2 ... green -apples-15). Even if I had a macro editing and saving the images for me, I'd go back and change the file names to some degree, personally, especially if the keyword is in the file names over and over.

"Should the file name and the title ever be different?" I'd ask "Should the file name and the title always be the same?" Makes the question a bit more apparent that the answer is "yeah, they should probably be different at times." But I don't think I ever even use the title. I may be wasting opportunities, but all I do is give the image file a name related to the section the image is in, and then they get an alt text in a similar fashion, but they aren't always the same. They might be sometimes, and sometimes it might be just one or two words. I also never use the description.

A day will come when Google runs out of things to screw us around with and they'll introduce some semi-heavily weighted usability metric based on "accessibility", and having descriptions and all that will probably matter, just like the other screen-reader type stuff like having labels on fields. In this case the only obvious solution is to make the CMS copy the alt text to the title and description, and we're right back to square one with the same text in each field.

But as of right now, there's somethings I don't do to save time when scaling. And with the things I do, I try not to be too lazy or scripted about it so I'm not over-optimizing. Worst of both worlds!

 

[thisishatred]

So just to comment on the alt tags bit; I think helping the user is the most important thing and that's how I've always approached image names and alt tags.

From what I've seen of AI they can actually determine what's going on in photos. I can't seem to locate the video I was going to use as a reference, but when the AI was asked questions about the photo it was able to iterate things like foot orientation, where the photo was taken, if what the person was doing in the photo was in jest, etc.

As another example of use-case: One of our BuSo members @Marx_Melencio is blind and alt text are used as descriptors for his screen reader; He wants to know what the image actually is vs an SEO stuffing an image with keywords to rank.

His example:

I prefer brief yet descriptive alt text for images, i.e. For a photo of a cat, I don't want to have my screenreader read something like "best catfood 2022", nor a lazy attempt like "cat".
• Instead, I want to know what kind of cat it is (or at least how it looks), where it's at, and what it's doing, i.e. "vibrant picture of fat black alley cat on a kitchen table, eating".
—> I do hope Google factors this into their Google Brain's SERP algo soon (and gives it considerable weight). It'll give me and my blind peers so much value.

I'd keep stuff like this in mind for the future.