Answering your questions about ALT texts
Also called "alt tags" and "alt descriptions," alt text is the written copy that appears in place of an image on a webpage if the image fails to load on a user's screen. This text helps screen-reading tools describe images to visually impaired readers and allows search engines to better crawl and rank your website.
Alt text serves as anchor text for image links Google uses it to understand more about the web page and what it's about. But not all links are text; some are images. Google states: If you do decide to use an image as a link, filling out its alt text helps Google understand more about the page you're linking to.
With a limit of about 125 characters, an ALT tag should provide enough detail for users and search engines to relate the image to the context of the page.
TinyIMG can optimize only Product, collection and Blog main image ALT texts due to Shopify limitations. We cannot reach images that are from other apps or manually uploaded to your theme.
The first thing to do is to check if the ALT text is present on product images on the Shopify admin products section. If the ALT text is present, It means that your theme fails to add the “alt” attribute to the image HTML tag. In this case, you can reach out to your theme developer and they should add It easily.
The status “Optimized” means that the ALT text was downloaded from your Shop and optimized (If ALT text optimization setting is on). “Optimized manually” means that the ALT text was updated by you in our ALT texts editor and It will be excluded from automatic ALT text optimization in the future (It will not be overwritten automatically). “Restored” means that the ALT text for the image was restored to the initial state that It was when we downloaded It from your store.
Describe the image as specifically as possible, keep it (relatively) short, use your keywords, avoid keyword stuffing. Usually the ALT template “#product_name# - #shop_name#” does the trick, but you might want to add variant options if you have any.