More standard fields for images

[ceberlin]

Now that tags are possible for images I wonder whether this could be stored with images also:

- ALT

- COPYRIGHT

Why?

I have the description field which I use as caption and as "alt" attribute at the moment.

But my editors have problems with that and fill up the description with to much information.

I would like to store some information separately:

1. description would be output as caption.

2. the alt attribute would be open for manipulations to the SEO guys - without them ruining the caption.

If no alt attribute is set, I would output the the description and if there is no description either, a ".".

So we are always validating with out the need to code this manually for every single image used.

3. The copyright: This could be placed where we like it, maybe at the bottom of the page.

This is very important to make the usage of many stock images legal. And we do not need to misuse the description for that any more.

[adrian]

Have you seen this post:

http://processwire.com/talk/topic/417-extending-image-field/

It describes how you can extend it yourself to handle the extra fields.

[teppo]

Technically speaking I've got nothing to add to above, but I couldn't resist commenting on one point here: alt text is not for "SEO guys." Please don't use it that way. Ever.

The whole purpose of alt text is to provide meaningful alternative content for those who can't see your images -- using it to insert extra metadata for robots is very, very wrong.

Sorry for the rant, but this is such a common usability fail that it's getting annoying; way too often alt texts are used either for SEO purposes ("hey, let's consider robots before humans!") or entirely useless metadata (a picture of a cat with alt text "a cat".. was that really useful for someone who can't see the image?)

[Martijn Geerts]

Interesting point takin Teppo. As search engine becomes smarter and more 'human', fooling search engines with simple words has become questionable. I tend to think, search engines love 'packages' of information. A good header a few good paragraphs, a good link to related material and good naming conventions for images and their an alt text.

In my opinion, search engines try to find what's best for a human to read.

More, it's likely that search engines recognize some kind of social aspect. Is a site friendly for colour blindness ? What do users see when they have a poor connection. How is the bandwidth. All the little bit help if you asked me.

[teppo]

@Martijn: search engines have surely improved their algorithms a lot, but there are still things that are pretty hard for them to get right. One of these is whether alternate content is really relevant to the visually impaired, another is the general subject of usability. Sure, page speed matters, but what about totally unusable navigation, unreadable font face or inconsistent UI in general?

Personally I'm a big fan of trying to analyze just about any data and making educated guesses about how good it is for purpose x, but I don't think we're quite there yet. According to some experts "human factors" are nowhere near the top of the list, at least. "Social" factors sure are, though in a different meaning than what you probably had in mind..

(Actually above link kind of seems to suggest that alt texts are considered good for SEO if they contain important keywords already visible in other content. This doesn't sound like a very good thing to me, as I fear it only encourages people to use them to repeat same things they've already mentioned in body content and headlines, which in turn doesn't necessarily imply any correlation with them being useful to the visually impaired.)

[Joss]

One interesting thing I have read about SEO and images is the way google looks at both the alt and the title tag. Generally, they look at the alt attribute most, but (and Teppo's point is well made) it scores better if it is used how it should be - a simple, readable phrase that has a direct relationship to the image content.

But the other thing to note is that some SEO specialists say that if you are using a title attribute then it should not be just a repeat of the alt, but be a clear and separate title for the image.

If you are putting your keywords into alt and title, therefore, you should ensure that they are a) relevant and b) different to each other.

But as with every thing SEO, there are probably a thousand conflicting ideas out there, proving that there is an entire industry making money by basically guessing!

[ceberlin]

WISHLIST: Forgot to mention that it would be great if those fields were language aware. Are they?

SEO: Well its a bit off topic but interesting enough:

I was mentioning the technical CMS need for an alt text. I was not talking about content in there.

When talking about "the SEO guys", I do not mean manipulations, keyword stuffing and other eval things.

They sometimes like to but things slightly differently in there than in the caption texts.

And I want to make that possible, technically. - Client is king

You could use that data also to output a "title" attribute - for a basic mouseover help text, and so on...

[ryan]

It is possible to extend the existing images field (by code) to make it do what you want. But a simpler solution (especially on the multi-language side) would be to use a repeater, where each item has a single image field and you add whatever text/multi-language fields that you need. 

[dragan]

It would be easy to split the textarea inputfield that's already there into "each line = separate language alt text" in your template(s). The rest would simply be conventions, i.e. make sure the client / editor really fills in all the text.