WordPress – Find All Images with Short Alt Text in the Media Library

Your images’ alt texts should be descriptive enough so that when images are not loaded in somebody’s browser, they know what the image is about. This is one of the purposes of adding alt texts to your images.

For example, if you have a picture of a bowl containing cream strawberries, and your image has “strawberries” as its alt text, your readers may not completely get what the image is about. It could be a drawing of strawberries, a strawberry matte, strawberries on a chair, or anything else.

In that case, we agree that you need to be more specific, don’t we? Therefore, you should dedicate some time to find all your images with too short alt text in order to be more specific. This will help your readers’ experience in your website and will potentiate your possibilities of getting good positions on google (SEO).

Now, the time you have to dedicate to search all your images with alt text too short or not very specific will be enough considering the amount of files you have in your WordPress media library. But don’t worry. We have an excellent solution for you.

1- Install the “Media Library Spreadsheet” plugin

This plugin simplifies your media files management by allowing you to edit them on a spreadsheet. You can quickly apply advanced searches such as the one we’ll apply in this tutorial, and you can apply changes to thousands of files at once.

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

2- Open the plugin’s “Search” tool

Normally, you would have to spend hours checking your images one by one. But with the Search tool you can save lots of time. This tool is located on the plugin’s toolbar, so just click on it to open.

3- Filter all your images with short alt text

Since the spreadsheet shows you all types of media files, you need to filter the images only. Besides, those images must contain short alt texts. That means we’ll filter the images by character length.

For that, you just need to tick the Enable advanced filters checkbox and then select these values.

Image filter

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

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

Short alt text filter

• Field key: Alt text
• Operator: CHARACTER LENGTH <
• Value: 10

This filter means we’re looking for all files with alt text containing less than ten characters.

Finally, just click on Run search to filter all your images with short alt text.

Done!

Now your images with alt texts containing less than ten characters will be loaded on the spreadsheet.

It was really simple and fast. You don’t need to use any strange snippet or spend lots of hours finding your files because the plugin does it all for you. In a sense, you just ask the plugin what you want.