Changing Alt text not working

Thank you for your report. Thanks as well for including the links to your screen shots; very helpful.

Your first shot, 9-37-14, looks like a portion of the Media/Assistant Quick Edit area. I do not understand the source of your second shot, 9-41-41. I have not been able to find an “Image Details” area on my system. Can you give me the source of this shot and/or the steps I can follow to reproduce it?

After you complete the Quick Edit action, does the ALT Text column in the Media/Assistant submenu table show the correct result? Does the Media/Edit Media screen show the correct result?

Any additional information you can give me will help me investigate further. Thanks for your patience and your interest in the plugin.

Hi, @dglingren

The first shot comes from the quick edit link in the “Media” -> “Assistant” list, see https://www.datanumen.com/temp/images/2021-11-07_5-30-45.jpg

After completing the edit, the Alt Text column shows the correct value, see https://www.datanumen.com/temp/images/2021-11-07_5-30-45.jpg

Also the media/edit screen shows the correct value, see https://www.datanumen.com/temp/images/2021-11-07_5-30-00.jpg

The second shot comes from the post edit interface, when I select the image and click “Edit” link, see https://www.datanumen.com/temp/images/2021-11-07_5-23-30.jpg

• This reply was modified 3 years, 4 months ago by chcw.

Thanks for your update with the additional information. I am able to reproduce your steps and match the results you posted in your screen shots.

The MLA Quick Edit area allows you to update the database information associated with a Media Library item. The fact that you can see the correct results in the Media/Assistant submenu table column and in the Media/Edit Media screen shows that this is working properly.

Your final screen shot, 5-23-30, shows the “Classic Editor” Visual tab. This confirms that the problem is not in the database but in the content WordPress adds to the post/page when you insert an image. If you change to the Text tab you will see something like this:

<img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-8171" src="https://l.mladev/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Screenshot-2020-08-03-at-17.13-1-300x232.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="232" />

When you insert the image, WordPress copies information such as the ALT Text from the database and hard-codes it into the IMG tag added to the post/page content. If you change the database information later, neither WordPress nor MLA will go searching through all your posts/pages looking for inserts that must also be updated. This is a very common issue/problem.

The current MLA version includes the “MLA Insert Fixit” example plugin that contains a number of tools for updating IMG tags in post/page inserts. You can find details in this earlier support topic:

Update ALT tags in posts from media library ALT tags

I hope the tools in the example plugin will help you achieve your goal. I am marking this topic resolved, but please update it if you have any problems or further questions regarding the solution provided by the example plugin.