How to Generate AI Alt Text for Shopify Product Images

Most Shopify catalogs ship with hundreds of images and almost no alt text. That's a quiet loss on two fronts: Google Images can't tell what your products are, and shoppers using screen readers hear nothing but a filename.

GoodySell AI Alt Generator scans your products, writes descriptive alt text with AI, and shows you every result before it touches your store. This guide covers the whole workflow — install, scan, generate, review, apply — plus what the output actually looks like.

Install GoodySell AI Alt Generator

What Alt Text Is and Why It Matters for Shopify SEO

Alt text (alternative text) is a short written description attached to an image. It does three jobs at once:

• Accessibility — screen readers read it aloud, so shoppers who are blind or low-vision know what each image shows.

• Search visibility — search engines can't see pictures, so they rely on alt text to understand and rank them. It's how your products surface in Google Images.

• A readable fallback — when an image fails to load, the alt text is what appears in its place.

What good alt text actually looks like

The gap between a skipped image and a described one is bigger than it sounds:

The third one describes what's in the frame — colours, construction, how it's shown — in a sentence a person could read aloud. That's the target the app writes toward.

Installing the App

Install GoodySell AI Alt Generator from the Shopify App Store and open it from your Shopify admin. It runs entirely inside the admin: nothing to add to your theme, no code to touch. You land on the Home screen with a short overview of the process.

One thing worth knowing up front: alt text is language-specific. If your store sells in more than one language, you scan and generate for each language separately. The app is built around that — pick a language, work through it, repeat.

(And yes — the screenshot captions in this guide are written as real alt text. It would have been strange to publish a guide about alt text without any.)

Step 1: Scan Your Store

Open the Scan & Select tab or click Get Started. Choose your language from the dropdown menu - it lists the languages your store publishes that are supported by the app - and click Scan Images.

The app fetches every product image and checks which ones already have alt text in that language. When it finishes you get a straight count: total images, how many are covered, how many still need text, plus a coverage indicator.

Step 2: Select Images

Below the overview are your images, with two filters:

• Missing Alt — no alt text yet. Usually where you start.

• Has Alt — already described, for when you want to regenerate something thin or outdated.

Pick images individually, select the whole visible page, or use quick-select to grab a batch in one click. You can clear the selection anytime and change how many images show per page.

Step 3: Configure Length and Brand Name

Open Settings. Two options do most of the work:

Maximum charakters per alt text. The allowed range adapts to your selected language, because character-dense scripts like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean carry the same meaning in far fewer characters than Latin-script languages. The app keeps your input inside the sensible range for that language automatically. For English, output tends to land around 120 characters — long enough to be specific, short enough that a screen reader doesn't turn one image into a paragraph.

Include brand name in the alt. With this on, the description leads with your vendor or brand name — useful for consistency across a catalog and for brand visibility in image search. With it off, you get product-first descriptions like the examples below.

A summary panel confirms your language, style, and length before you generate anything.

Step 4: Generate

With images selected and settings set, click Generate Alt Text. The AI reads each image — product, colours, shape, construction details — and writes a description in your chosen language, combining what's visible in the frame with your product information. Generation runs in the background, so you can watch progress as it works through the batch.

What the Output Looks Like

Three real results from a ski-wear catalog, generated in English with brand name off:

Ski Jacket

Ski Jacket in pink and burgundy blocks with black zippers, hooded collar, two side pockets, and a fitted silhouette on model

Women's Ski Gloves

Women's Ski Gloves: white shell, black palm, mitten shape, adjustable strap, elastic cuffs, subtle snowflake logo emblem

Women's Ski Suit

Women's Ski Suit in pink, white, and black with colorblock jacket, zipper, chest pocket, hood, and pink pants with panels

Three things to notice. The colour breakdowns are specific — "pink and burgundy blocks," "white shell, black palm" — not just "pink jacket." Construction details a shopper would care about make it in: hooded collar, adjustable strap, chest pocket. And the jacket description ends with on model, because that's genuinely part of what the image shows. None of them read like a keyword list.

Step 5: Review and Edit

Nothing reaches your store until you approve it. The Review tab shows every generated description next to its image, where you can:

• Edit any description inline to adjust wording.

• Reject results you don't want — removal is confirmed before anything is discarded.

• Approve the ones you're happy with.

This step is the point of the whole flow. The AI does the volume work; the published wording is still yours.

Step 6: Apply to Your Store

Click Apply to Store and the approved text saves back to your Shopify products. For your store's primary language it updates the image's alt text directly. For additional languages it saves the description as a translation, so each language keeps its own correct text without overwriting the others.

Then repeat the cycle — scan, generate, review, apply — for the next language.

Tips for Better Results

• Finish one language before starting the next. It keeps coverage numbers meaningful and stops you losing track of what's done.

• Use the Has Alt filter to upgrade old text. Descriptions inherited from another tool are often one or two generic words. Regenerating them is usually a bigger win than covering the last few missing images.

• Tidy your product titles and translations first. The AI uses them as context, so "Women's Ski Gloves" produces better output than "SKU-GL-04 WHT."

• Skim the Review tab anyway. The output is specific, but only you know that the "burgundy" panel is officially called Merlot in your catalog.

Keeping Coverage Up

The Home screen shows your current plan and how much of your monthly allowance you've used. As you add products, scan again and generate for the new images — a two-minute habit that keeps a growing catalog fully described.

FAQ

Will it overwrite alt text I've already written?

Only if you choose to. Images with existing text sit behind the Has Alt filter and aren't included when you work from Missing. Anything regenerated still passes through Review before it's applied.

Does it work on multi-language stores?

Yes, one language at a time. Your primary language updates the image's alt text field; additional languages are saved as translations, so nothing overwrites anything else.

Do I have to review every result?

Everything you approve gets applied, so yes — approval is the gate. In practice you'll skim, edit a handful, and approve the rest in batches.

How long should Shopify alt text be?

Roughly 100–125 characters is the sweet spot for English: descriptive enough for search, short enough that screen readers stay usable. The app's per-language limits are set around that.

Does it touch my theme or require code?

No. It runs inside the Shopify admin and writes to your product image data. Nothing is added to your theme files.

What happens if I run out of monthly allowance mid-batch?

You’ll need to either upgrade to a different plan to continue generating alt text, or wait until your allowance resets at the start of the next billing month.

Get Your Catalog Described

Alt text is a small SEO and accessibility win that most stores never collect, and the reason is always the same: nobody wants to write two hundred product descriptions by hand. Five clicks per language is a different proposition.

Install GoodySell AI Alt Generator from the Shopify App Store, run a scan, and you'll know your exact coverage gap in under a minute.