Writing alt-text that helps SEO and accessibility

Alt-text is the short written description attached to an image. A screen reader announces it to someone who cannot see the photograph. A crawler reads it to understand what a page is about. It is, on a photography site, very often the only text on the page — which makes it strange that most galleries ship with none at all, or with forty files described as "IMG_4471".

Write for the person first

The correct mental model is this: someone is listening to your page through a screen reader. What do they need to know for the page to make sense? Not every detail — the aim is not to recreate the photograph in words, it is to convey what the image contributes here.

"Bride laughing as her father adjusts her veil in a bright hallway" is useful. "Beautiful emotional wedding photo" is not: it describes your opinion, not the content. "Wedding photographer Bordeaux wedding photography Gironde" is worse than useless — it is a page full of noise for a listener, and search engines have discounted that pattern for well over a decade.

A working shape

• —Subject: who or what is in the frame.
• —Action: what they are doing.
• —Context: where, or the light, when it matters to the story.
• —Stop. One sentence is usually right; two is the maximum.

Aim for roughly 80 to 125 characters. Screen readers do not truncate, but attention does, and a listener working through a gallery of thirty images will not thank you for thirty long paragraphs.

Things to leave out

• —"Image of" or "photo of" — the screen reader already announces that it's an image.
• —Keyword lists, location stuffing and your business name on every file.
• —Camera settings, unless the page is specifically about technique.
• —Text that duplicates the caption directly beneath the image.

Decorative images take empty alt-text

If an image carries no information — a texture, a divider, a rule between sections — give it alt="" so assistive technology skips it. That empty attribute is a deliberate signal, and it is very different from omitting the attribute altogether, which makes a screen reader fall back to reading the filename aloud.

Where the SEO benefit actually comes from

Alt-text is a modest direct ranking factor, and anyone promising otherwise is selling something. Its real value is threefold: it is the primary way images get understood for image search, which sends real traffic to photographers; it adds genuine topical text to pages that are otherwise wordless; and it is a documented accessibility requirement in a growing number of jurisdictions, including the European Accessibility Act, which now applies to many commercial sites.

Put differently: the reason to do it is that a portion of your visitors cannot see your work. The search benefit is a side effect of doing that job properly.

Doing it at gallery scale

The reason alt-text goes missing is arithmetic. Thirty images per post, thirty posts a year, is nine hundred sentences a year that produce no visible reward. Very few people sustain that manually.

This is one of the three things Framestory returns for every shoot: a written description for each photograph, generated from the actual image content rather than the filename, ready to paste into your gallery or CMS. Read them before publishing — the engine describes what it sees, and only you know that the man adjusting the veil is her father rather than the officiant. That correction takes seconds; writing nine hundred sentences from scratch does not.

A short checklist

• —Every meaningful image has alt-text; every decorative one has alt="".
• —It describes content, not quality or emotion.
• —It reads as a sentence someone would say out loud.
• —No two images on a page share the same description.
• —It does not repeat the visible caption word for word.