Naming Image Files Before You Upload

Two separate things

Frequently confused and worth separating.

The filename is what the file is called. It appears in the address of the image and gives a small signal about the subject.

The alt text is a description stored in the page, read aloud by screen readers and shown if the image fails to load.

The first is a minor benefit and takes no effort. The second matters considerably more, for accessibility and for anybody whose connection dropped the image.

Why filenames are worth renaming

Three reasons, in increasing order of importance to you.

Search engines read them, and a file called oak-kitchen-island-burnaby says something that IMG_4471 does not. The effect is small and it is free.

Image search sends real traffic for visual trades, and the filename is part of what it uses.

And you have to find these files later. A media library of four hundred images called IMG-something is unsearchable, which means uploading the same photograph three times because nobody could find the original.

That third reason is the one that will actually affect your week.

How to name them

• Describe what is in the picture, in a few words.
• Use hyphens between words, not spaces or underscores.
• Lower case throughout, since some servers care.
• Include the location where it is genuinely relevant.
• Keep it short, four or five words rather than a sentence.
• Avoid dates and numbers unless they mean something.

What to avoid is stuffing: a filename listing six services and three towns reads as manipulation and does nothing useful.

The test is whether the name describes the image. If it describes your business instead, it is wrong.

Alt text, which matters more

The description read aloud to somebody using a screen reader.

For that person, the alt text is the image. A photograph with no alt text is announced as an unlabelled graphic, which is the equivalent of a blank space.

It is also what appears if the image does not load, which happens on poor connections more often than people assume.

And it is a legal expectation in many contexts, as well as being straightforwardly the right thing to do.

Writing alt text well

Describe what is in the image and why it is there.

"Fitted oak kitchen with island and integrated sink" is useful. "Kitchen" is thin. "Kitchen fitting Burnaby kitchen renovation Coquitlam" is keyword stuffing and actively unpleasant to listen to.

Keep it to a sentence. Do not begin with "image of" or "photograph of", since the screen reader already says that.

And describe the thing that matters. If the point of the image is the joint rather than the room, say so.

A worked example

A tiling business with about two hundred images, all named by camera default, none with alt text.

Renaming everything was not practical. They took the forty images that appeared on their main service pages and did those.

Filenames became descriptive. Alt text described each image in a sentence.

Two things followed. Image search began sending a modest but real number of visitors, which had previously been almost none.

And their own media library became usable, which the owner described as the more valuable of the two, because he had been re-uploading photographs he already had.

The whole exercise was an afternoon for the forty that mattered.

The counter-case

Where alt text should be empty.

Purely decorative images: a background texture, a divider, a shape that carries no information.

For those, an empty alt attribute is correct, because it tells the screen reader to skip it. Leaving it out entirely is different and causes the filename to be read aloud, which is worse.

Also where the image duplicates adjacent text. A photograph of a certificate beside a paragraph naming the certificate does not need the same words twice.

The judgement is whether somebody who cannot see the image would miss anything. If not, empty is right.

Captions, which are different again

A third thing frequently confused with the other two.

A caption is visible text beneath an image, read by everybody. Alt text is invisible and read only by screen readers and when the image fails.

They serve different purposes and should say different things. A caption adds context for a sighted reader: where it was, what it cost, how long it took.

Alt text describes the picture itself for somebody who cannot see it.

Where a caption already describes the image fully, the alt text can be shorter or empty, because repeating it means hearing the same sentence twice.

For a portfolio, captions are frequently the more valuable of the two, because they carry the specifics that turn a photograph into evidence.

Doing it at the right moment

Before uploading, always.

Renaming a file after it is on the site means changing its address, which breaks anything linking to it and requires a redirect.

Whereas renaming on your own computer, before it goes anywhere, costs seconds and has no consequences.

The habit worth building: resize, rename, then upload, in that order, as one action rather than three separate intentions.

What this is not worth doing for

Proportion, because image naming attracts a lot of advice relative to its effect.

Renaming files will not rescue a page that is not ranking. It is a small signal among many, and treating it as a lever produces disappointment.

The businesses that benefit most are the visual trades, where somebody genuinely searches for images: interiors, landscaping, joinery, food, anything where people look before they read.

For a service business whose customers never use image search, the filename benefit is close to nothing and the alt text benefit is entirely about accessibility.

Which is still a good reason to do it, and a different reason from the one usually given.

Where to start with an existing site

1. List the pages that receive the most visitors.
2. Add alt text to every image on those pages first.
3. Rename only the images you are replacing anyway.
4. Set the habit for everything new.
5. Ignore the rest unless you are redoing those pages.

The third avoids the trap. Renaming existing images means redirects and broken links, and the benefit rarely justifies the disruption. Alt text can be added freely, because it changes nothing about the address at all.

How to prepare the images themselves is covered in the photograph that weighs four megabytes.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.