How to add alt text to WooCommerce product gallery images

Most WooCommerce stores fill in alt text for the main product image and forget the gallery. That is understandable: the gallery sits in a separate box on the product screen, and nothing in WooCommerce warns you when it is empty. But every gallery image is its own attachment with its own alt field, and shoppers who use a screen reader hear nothing useful when that field is blank. Google Images and product search get nothing to match either.

Here is how the gallery works, how to check it, and what to write.

Where WooCommerce gets gallery alt text from

WooCommerce stores two kinds of product image:

• Product image (the featured image), one per product.
• Product gallery, any number of extra images.

Both are ordinary Media Library attachments. When the product page loads, WooCommerce asks WordPress for each attachment's alt text and prints it in the page. So the alt text lives on the attachment, not on the product. That has two useful consequences:

1. Fixing an image in the Media Library fixes it on every product that uses it.
2. Typing the product name into the product description does nothing for the images.

Check one product in under a minute

1. Open the product page on the front end.
2. Right-click a gallery image and choose Inspect.
3. Look at the <img> tag. Recent WooCommerce versions fill an empty alt with the product name and a position, such as alt="Blue Linen Shirt - Image 2". That text comes from WooCommerce, not from the image, so treat it the same as an empty alt.

If every gallery image reads as the product name plus "Image 2", "Image 3" and so on, you have found the usual gap. To be sure, open the image in Media > Library and check whether the Alternative Text field is empty.

Fix a single image by hand

1. Go to Media > Library and open the image (or click it inside the product's gallery box and choose edit).
2. Fill in the Alternative Text field.
3. Save. The product page picks it up straight away.

What to write for a gallery image

The common mistake is pasting the product title into every slot. Five images all called "Blue Linen Shirt" tell a shopper nothing about what each photo shows. Describe the photo itself:

• Angle or view: "Back view of the blue linen shirt showing the box pleat."
• Detail: "Close-up of the coconut shell buttons."
• Variant or colour: "Blue linen shirt in sage green, folded."
• Scale or context: "Model wearing the shirt untucked with chinos, size M."
• Pack contents: "Three-pack of beeswax wraps laid flat, small, medium and large."

Keep it to a sentence. Skip "image of" and "photo of", since screen readers already announce an image. Include the product name once if it fits naturally, then spend the rest of the words on what is different about this shot.

If a gallery image is purely decorative (a texture swatch repeated on every product, say), an empty alt can be correct. Most product photos are not decorative, though: they are the reason people buy. WooCommerce fills an empty gallery alt with the product name, so leaving the field empty will not give a truly empty alt on the product page.

When you have hundreds of products

Doing this one image at a time is fine for ten products. It does not finish for five hundred, especially when each product has four or five gallery shots.

This is the job I built OpptiAI Alt Text for. It scans your Media Library, which is where WooCommerce keeps product and gallery images, and shows how many images are missing alt text, how many need review and how many are optimized. Then it writes a descriptive alt text for each image you generate, from what is actually in the photo, so gallery shots get different descriptions rather than five copies of the title.

A few things worth knowing before you try it:

• Bulk generate works through the images missing alt text, and only changes the images you choose. Automatic generation only runs on new uploads that arrive without alt text, and you can edit any result at any time.
• You stay in control. You can edit any result at any time, from the plugin or from the Media Library.
• Bulk is free within the allowance. In the plugin's ALT Library, Optimize all missing fills every image that has no alt text, gallery shots included. Paid plans add volume for big catalogues.
• No OpenAI key. Generation runs through the OpptiAI service, so there is nothing extra to set up.
• New uploads: automatic alt text on upload (Autopilot) is part of the Growth and Agency plans. On other plans you run Generate when you add new products.

It is free to try, and the coverage scan works before you create an account, so you can see the size of the gap first.

A quick routine for new products

Even with the backlog cleared, gaps creep back each time someone adds a product. A simple habit helps: before you publish a product, open each gallery image and check the alt field. Or run the coverage scan once a month and fix whatever has slipped.

Try it on your own catalogue: install OpptiAI Alt Text, open OpptiAI Alt Text > ALT Library and click Optimize all missing.

The catalogue-scale buying page is WooCommerce image SEO. The Media Library steps are on bulk alt text for WordPress. The product page is OpptiAI Alt Text.