Product image alt text on Shopify: what it is and how to fix it at scale
Last updated: 31 July 2026
Alt text is the short written description attached to an image. Shopify stores it per image, and it does two jobs: it tells a screen reader what the picture shows, and it gives search engines the only readable signal about an image's content. An image with no alt text is, to both, effectively blank.
Why it matters
Product images without alt text are invisible to image search, which for visual categories like homeware, apparel and furniture is a real source of discovery. It is also an accessibility problem: a shopper using a screen reader hears nothing useful where your product photo should be.
It is one of the most common gaps in a mid-size catalog, because Shopify never requires alt text and bulk product imports almost never include it. A store with 2,000 products and three images each has 6,000 chances to miss it.
How to find products missing alt text
Shopify's admin does not offer a filter for it, which is the core difficulty — you cannot see the gap by browsing. Options, worst to best:
- Open products one by one and check each image. Fine for 20 products, impossible past a few hundred.
- Export products to CSV. The image alt column is included, so you can sort and spot blanks — but the export does not tell you which images belong to which variant, and you cannot fix it from the CSV.
- Use a tool that checks every image and reports the gaps directly.
How to write alt text that is actually useful
- Describe what the image shows, not what you want to rank for. "Grey linen cushion cover on a wooden bench" beats "cushion cover buy online cheap".
- Keep it short — a sentence fragment, not a paragraph.
- Do not start with "Image of" or "Photo of"; screen readers already announce that it is an image.
- If the image is purely decorative, empty alt text is correct. For product photos it almost never is.
- Do not repeat the same alt text across every image of a product. Describe the angle or detail that image shows.
How Catamend handles it
Catamend's missing_image_alt_text rule checks every image on every product and lists the ones with no alt text, ranked with the rest of your findings so you can see how big the gap is before deciding to act.
The fix is one click and generates alt text from the product's own attributes rather than inventing marketing copy. Critically, it only writes where alt text is genuinely absent — it never overwrites text you wrote yourself — and every change is recorded with the before and after value, so you can see exactly what was set and undo it if you disagree.
On Growth and Pro you can turn on auto-fix, which applies alt text after every scan so new products never sit without it.
Check your own catalog
Catamend scans every product and variant against 23 checks like this one, ranks what it finds by impact, and applies the safe fixes in one click with a full before-and-after history. Install Catamend from the Shopify App Store.