WordPress – Find Images Without Alt Text or Caption

Alt text is really important if you want to get a good position on Google. Search engines use the alt text field to filter your website’s files and show them to people when they search on Google..

Captions are also really important when, for example, you want to give credit to photographers for their work. That way, you avoid legal and even financial problems. No one wants to lose their money by not giving credit to someone for their work.

Now imagine that you haven’t set up the alt text or caption of your WordPress files. That can cause you some problems, and now it’s impossible to find those files in WordPress because the filtering options of the normal editor don’t allow you to find the files without alt text or caption.

That’s why we want to show you how to quickly find all your images without alt text or caption in a few minutes. Just follow these simple steps.

1- Install the Media Library Spreadsheet plugin

Spreadsheets simplify the way we organize and edit important info. And that’s what we intend to do with the Media Library Spreadsheet. We want to simplify the way you manage your files.

This plugin displays all your media files on a spreadsheet where you can edit freely. It contains a powerful Bulk Edit tool for you to apply changes on hundreds of files in seconds. It also contains an advanced Search tool to help you filter your files in seconds.

2- Open the Media Library Spreadsheet

Once installed and activated, go to Sheet Editor > Edit Media to open the plugin, and you’ll see the spreadsheet containing all your files and their complete info.

3- Open the plugin’s “Search” tool

In order to filter all your images without alt text or captions, you need to use the Search tool. It’s located on the plugin’s toolbar, so you just need to click on it to open.

4- Filter the images without alt text or captions

Since the spreadsheet shows you all types of media files, you need to filter the images only and combine that search with the fact that those images must not have alt text or captions. For that, you need to use these fields and values.

First, tick the Enable advanced filters checkbox and use the following values.

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

Now you need to combine that advanced filter with either the alt text or caption filter. For that, just click on the Add new button to add a new filter, and use the values you wish.

Option 1: No alt text

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

Option 2: No caption

• Field key: Caption
• Operator: =
• Value: Leave it empty

Once done, click on Run search and the plugin will filter all the files and show them on the spreadsheet.

Done!

It’s really simple. You don’t need to use any strange PHP codes nor spend lots of hours trying to find your images without alt text or captions.