The field everybody skips
Ask ten photographers what they put in the alt text field and nine will say "the what?" That's not a knock — for most of Lightroom's history the field didn't exist, and even now it's buried where you'd never trip over it. But if your photos end up on the web — your portfolio, a client's site, a publication, a stock library — alt text is the one piece of metadata that does double duty: it makes your work usable for people who can't see it, and it tells Google Images what's actually in the frame.
I skipped it for years too. Here's what it is, why it's worth your time, and how to stop writing it by hand.
What alt text is and where it lives in your files
Alt text (alternative text) is a short written description of what's visible in an image. On the web it ends up in the alt attribute of an image tag, where screen readers speak it aloud and search engines read it as the literal content of the picture.
What most photographers don't know is that alt text has an official home inside the file. The IPTC Photo Metadata Standard added an Alt Text (Accessibility) property in 2021 — stored as Iptc4xmpCore:AltTextAccessibility in XMP — alongside a longer companion field, Extended Description. That means alt text can travel with the image the same way your copyright and keywords do, instead of being retyped by whoever publishes the photo.
Adobe added both fields to Lightroom Classic in version 12, so if you're on anything recent, the field is sitting in your catalog right now, almost certainly empty.
Three reasons it's worth filling in
1. Accessibility. Screen-reader users experience your portfolio one alt attribute at a time. An empty one reads as silence or a filename. WCAG — the standard behind most accessibility law, including the European Accessibility Act that took effect in 2025 — requires meaningful text alternatives for images. Publishers and commercial clients are increasingly on the hook for this, which leads to reason three.
2. Image SEO. Google's own image guidance lists alt text as a signal for understanding what a photo shows. Pages with descriptive image alt text surface in Google Images for searches your filename and caption never would. For photographers, image search is a real discovery channel — it's how people find "fall senior portraits red rock" and land on your site.
3. Licensing and CMS workflows. If you deliver images to editorial clients, agencies, or anyone running a DAM, embedded IPTC fields get ingested automatically. A file that arrives with alt text already written is one less task for the photo desk — and one more reason your files are easier to license than the next photographer's. As accessibility requirements tighten, "alt text included" is quietly becoming a delivery expectation.
What good photo alt text looks like
Good alt text describes what a sighted person sees, in one plain sentence. Not the mood, not your camera settings, not "image of." Here's the difference on three real-world shots:
Senior portrait
- Skipped or weak: "senior portrait" — or worse,
IMG_4502.jpg. - Good: "A high-school senior in a denim jacket leans against a weathered barn door, laughing in warm evening light."
Landscape
- Weak: "Sunset in Zion."
- Good: "Last light on the sandstone face of the Watchman, with cottonwoods in fall color along the Virgin River below."
Event photo
- Weak: "Wedding reception photo."
- Good: "A bride and groom share a first dance under string lights while guests clap at the edge of a barn dance floor."
A few rules I follow:
- Lead with the subject, then setting and action. Front-load the part that matters.
- Keep it around 125 characters when you can. Longer detail belongs in the Extended Description field.
- Skip "photo of" and "image of" — screen readers already announce it's an image.
- Describe what's visible, not what you know. The model's name, the lens, the story behind the shoot — none of that helps someone picture the frame.
- Be careful with names. I shoot a lot of high-school seniors, and I don't put minors' names in embedded metadata, alt text included. "A high-school senior" describes the image just as well.
Writing alt text by hand in Lightroom Classic
The field exists in Lightroom Classic — it's just hidden behind a dropdown nobody touches. In the Library module, open the Metadata panel and click the view selector at the top of the panel (it usually says "Default"). Choose Accessibility. Two fields appear: Alt Text (Accessibility) and Extended Description (Accessibility). Type your description, and it's stored in the catalog and written out with the file's XMP on export.
The catch is volume. Alt text can't be synced across a shoot the way a copyright notice can — every frame needs its own sentence, because every frame shows something different. Writing 400 unique descriptions after a wedding is exactly the kind of job that never gets done, which is why the field stays empty in most catalogs.
Automating it on every frame
This is the problem I built Luxii to solve for my own catalog. It's a Lightroom Classic plugin that looks at each selected photo with AI and writes 19 IPTC fields in one pass — title, headline, caption, keywords, your creator and copyright info, location — and alt text, individually written for every frame. It works on RAW files directly (Lightroom renders the frame with your develop settings and crop), writes straight to the catalog, and never touches your develop edits.
One honest note on the landscape: as of June 2026, Luxii is the only Lightroom AI plugin that writes the IPTC alt text field at all. The other tools in this space — MetaMagic, LrGenius, LrTag, PhotoTag.ai, PhotoKeyworder, Excire, AnyVision — generate keywords, and in some cases titles and captions, but none of them touch AltTextAccessibility. If alt text matters to your workflow, that narrows the choice considerably.
The plugin is $39 one-time with 500 image credits included, and the first 25 images are free with no card, so you can check the output against your own standards before paying anything.
FAQ
How long should photo alt text be?
One sentence, ideally around 125 characters. That's comfortable for screen readers and forces you to lead with what matters. If an image needs more — a detailed editorial scene, an infographic — put the long version in IPTC's Extended Description field and keep alt text short.
Does embedded alt text actually help SEO?
Indirectly, when your CMS maps the field. Google reads the HTML alt attribute on the page, not the embedded IPTC field itself. The win is in the chain: when your file carries alt text, your CMS or DAM can map it into the attribute automatically, so the field on the page doesn't have to start empty. Embed it once and it follows the photo everywhere it's published.
Does every photo need alt text?
Every photo that conveys content does. Purely decorative images on a web page can use an empty alt attribute by design — but as the photographer delivering files, you rarely know how an image will be used. Write it for everything you deliver and let the publisher decide.