WordPress – How to Bulk Edit Image Alt Text or SEO Descriptions

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to bulk edit alt text or SEO descriptions in WordPress.

Setting good alt text or SEO descriptions for your WordPress images is crucial to get good rankings in search engines like Google, Bing, Etc. Otherwise, your content will never have a good raking in search engines, and people won’t find your content.

However, if you have hundreds of images without SEO alt text or description, you’ll have to spend lots of hours searching and editing the images.

That’s why we will show you how to edit SEO alt text or SEO descriptions for all your WordPress images

We’ll do it using the WP Sheet Editor – Media Library plugin. It allows you to manage your Media Library files on a spreadsheet that contains allows advanced search, bulk edit, export, and import.

Once installed and activated, open the media library spreadsheet by going to Sheet Editor > Edit Media.

Now you have at least four options to bulk update the alt text of your images.

1- Bulk edit the alt text using the spreadsheet

Since we know not all your images may have the same alt text, you can go to the Alt text column in the spreadsheet and start editing the values.

This is a great way to bulk update many images at once because you edit like you do in Excel, and then you save changes once.

Once you edit the alt text, click on Save.

2- Set the same alt text to all images in bulk

If you have related images that need to have the same alt text, it can be a great option to set the same alt text to all those images in bulk.

For this you need to use the Bulk Edit tool from WP Sheet Editor. It allows you to update thousands of media files with a few clicks.

But before you do it, how do you select the images to edit?

First, let’s filter the images only, since the spreadsheet shows all file types uploaded to your WordPress media library.

Click on Search on the toolbar.

Now select the following values to filter the images only:

• Tick the Enable advanced filters checkbox.
• Field: Format
• Operator: CONTAINS
• Value: image
• Click on Run search.

Note. The Search tool allows you to find media library files using all fields as search filters. Here are some examples:

• Keyword
• User who uploaded the file
• Keyword in title of associated post
• Post type the file is attached to
• Taxonomies in associated post
• Format
• Date
• Comment count
• Etc.

After you run the search, you will see all the images displayed in the spreadsheet, and the active filters above the spreadsheet.

Now you can edit all the search results, or you can manually select the images you will edit, by ticking each image using the checkbox picker.

Now just open the Bulk Edit tool, which will allow you to bulk update the alt text of all your selected images.

Once in the Bulk Edit tool, you need to select these values to set the same alt text to all the images:

• Select the rows that you want to update: You can edit all the search results or the manually selected items.
• What field do you want to edit: Alt text
• Select type of edit: Set value
• Replace existing value with this value: Enter the new alt text here.
• Click on Execute now.

After this, all the selected images’ alt text will be updated.

3- Import alt text from Excel or Google Sheets

Another great way to bulk edit alt text and SEO descriptions for all your images is to upload a CSV containing alt texts.

Here’s a tutorial that shows you how to import alt texts from a CSV file.

4- Copy from other columns to the “Alt text” column

With WP Sheet Editor, you can bulk change alt text by copying from other columns to the Alt Text column.

Here’s how to set the file name as the alt text for all your images.

With WP Sheet Editor, you can bulk update alt text for all your images in WordPress.