Search images with empty alt tag

Thanks for your question. The “Search Media” box is not designed to look for empty fields and will not be of much help. There are a couple of other MLA features that can give you some assistance.

First, you can display the ALT Text content as a column in the Media/Assistant submenu table. Click the “Screen Options” in the upper-right corner of the screen and then check the box in front of the ALT Text label. you should see the column added to the table immediately.

Hover your mouse over the “ALT Text” Column header and you will see a small triangle appear, indicating that this is a sortable column. Click on the column header and the table will sort by ALT Text in descending order. The brings all the items with a non-empty value to the front of the table. Click a second time to sort in ascending order, bringing all the items with an empty value to the front of the table. There you are!

You can also create a custom view for the Media/Assistant submenu table along the lines of the solution in this earlier topic:

Media Library Modal – Show Featured/Inserted In

That topic uses a custom field; you can create one for your task and then delete it when you’re through.

Either of the above approaches should get you what you seek. I am marking this topic resolved, but please update it if you have any problems or further questions regarding ALT Text analysis. Thanks for your interest in the plugin.

Hello David and thanks for your prompt reply.

Using the sort feature is a perfect solution, unfortunately it works for title, name and caption fields, but not for alt text.

When I click on the column header, it does not sort anything.

I have disabled all plugins and switched to the twenty fifteen theme and I still can’t get the alt columnn sorted. I’m using WP 4.3.1 and MLA 2.15.
Very strange.

Any idea or help is welcome !
Bérangère

Thanks for your update. I regret the problem you are having with ALT Text sorting. Of course, it works fine on my test system.

When you hover over the column header, does it behave like a link? Do you see the small triangle at the right of the column header?

When you click on the link, does anything happen? Does the page refresh but nothing changes?

Do you see these arguments added to your URL?

page=mla-menu&orderby=_wp_attachment_image_alt&order=asc

If the additional arguments are not added to the URL you can try adding them manually (after page=mla-menu) to force the sort.

Finally, you can set ALT Text as the default order for the Media/Assistant submenu table.

1. Navigate to the Settings/Media Library Assistant General tab.
2. Scroll down to the “Table Defaults” section.
3. Select “ALT Text” in the “Order By” dropdown.
4. Select the “Ascending” radio option.
5. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click “Save Changes” to record you new settings.

If none of the above suggestions resolve your problem you may have some odd database problem I have not encountered. Let me know how they work out.

Hi David,

Yes, when I hover over the column header, it behaves like a link. When I click, the page refreshes and the arguments are added to the URL.

I have changed the settings as per your indications and it does not change anything.

While doing these tests, I realized that the findings I have reported to you were not totally accurate. I was testing on a site with all ALT texts already filled. So I removed some ALT texts. Images with no ALT text immediately jumped on top of the list. Sorting still does not work.

To get more insights, I installed the plugin on 3 other sites that I have created. Same behaviour on 2 of them. Sorting works well on the 3rd one.

There is probably something with my sites (database ? incompatibility ?) which does not work well with your plugin.

Well, as I have a solution to my query (quickly identify images with no ALT text), I can live with it.

Thanks a lot for your support anyway and for this very useful plugin,

Bérangère

Thanks for your update and for all the testing you’ve done and reported on.. I must confess I do not understand exactly what is happening on your two sites that have this problem.

It does sound like the plugin and WordPress are operating normally. Sorting on ALT Text (and on custom field content) is different from sorting on fields like Title, Caption and Description because ALT Text and custom fields are held in a different database table. To sort and account for NULL (missing) values MLA must create an SQL view and join it to the posts table. As you suggested, something may be going wrong with this process.

The fact that empty fields jump to the top, however, suggests that at least part of the sorting process is working.

I see you have marked this topic resolved, and I am happy to see you “can live with it“, but if it becomes a more significant problem or you have additional information, please update this topic and I will investigate further. Thanks for your interest in the plugin.