WordPress – Find All Images with Empty Alt Text – Media Library

One of the keys to success with search engines is to define our images’ alt text. Unfortunately, this is one of the most neglected things when it comes to administering our website.

Just think about it. If your images have good alt texts, Google or other engines will suggest your contents to people who are looking for things similar to the ones your images show.

Do you see how important it is to quickly find all your media library files that don’t have alt text?

Now you have a problem to solve. You need to check all your files one by one to see if they have alt text or not, which will be tedious and will take a lot of time.

But don’t worry! We have great news. In this tutorial, we will show you how easy it is to find all your images without alt text so you can save a lot of time. It will only take a few simple steps that we show you below.

1- Install the Media Library Spreadsheet plugin

You need to install and activate this plugin, which simplifies your life completely because it allows you to manage your media library completely from a spreadsheet. You can apply changes to thousands of files and make advanced searches in seconds.

Once installed, go to Sheet Editor > Edit Media. There, you’ll see a spreadsheet containing all your media files and their complete information.

2- Open the plugins “Search” tool

In this case, we’ll use the Search tool to filter your files by format and empty alt text. You need to click on Search on the plugin’s toolbar in order to open the tool.

3- Search for all your images missing alt texts

Now you just need to tick the Enable advanced filters checkbox and then select these values in the two filters you’ll apply.

Format filter

• Field key: Format
• Operator: CONTAINS
• Value: image

Click on Add new and select these values in the new filter.

Empty alt text filter

• Field key: Alt text
• Operator: =
• Value: Leave it empty

Click on Run search to filter all your images missing alt text.

Done!

Now your images missing alt text will be displayed on the spreadsheet.

As you may have noticed, it doesn’t even take 10 minutes. Now you can edit your images alt text one by one on the spreadsheet, or you can set the same alt text for all your images.