This is where you enter ALT tag information in PhotoMechanic for WordPress

For the past week I’ve been trying to figure out how to add ALT metadata to my images that would be recognized on upload by WordPress. I THOUGHT WordPress stripped everything but my caption, headline and copyright. Today I had this astonishingly simple epiphany, just have a look at one of Nordica Photography’s sublime images inside of Photo Mechanic. There it was, “Iceland Photographer”, the same ALT text from their page. It turns out WordPress pulls the ALT tag info from Photo Mechanic’s “Title/Object Name” field under the “Status” section.

Of course, there are other ways you can ALT tag your images prior to posting on WordPress. Nordica Photography personally recommended Storyboard along with the following promo code “wayupnorth10” that will net you 10% off. (I’m assuming using that promo helps them out so it’s the least I can do in return for their time… and metadata 🙂 I haven’t tried Storyboard yet because I’m hesitant to drop $90 without a “try before you buy” or some money back guarantee. Then just today I found out BlogStomp is also capable of ALT tagging. It seemed you had to go through their blog editor to make it work though. I wasn’t patient enough to figure out how to get it to connect to my WP page and honestly, if I’m going to invest the time into writing ALT tags then I want them to be embedded into the original images otherwise for future use. So, I’m happy I found a way to add all my metadata including ALT tags for SEO to my original images using PhotoMechanic. I’m eager to see how my images start ranking in the near future.

— February 19, 2016 Update —

I started noticing that some of my ALT tags stopped auto populating when uploading to wordpress and it was driving my nuts. After countless experiments I came to the conclusion that images exported out of Light Room would auto populate alt tags written by Photo Mechanic while most images that didn’t go through a LR export process did not (such as the PNGs I converted to JPG via PM). Eventually I realized that the “Add embedded IPTC (XMP will always be written)” check box in the Photo Mechanic preferences was not checked. Now everything seems to be working again!