Image SEO – How To Name Your Files

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) – The process of optimizing a website to generate the maximum number of ‘organic’ (non-paid) visits from search engines.

The Correct Way To Name Your Photos For Image SEO

The question on a lot of photographers’ lips these days is: How do I get seen in a sea of similar websites?

Correctly naming your image files for optimal SEO, is a great way to start. Google can’t analyze the actual content of an image to tell what it is depicting, and whilst this technology is most certainly on the way, it’s nowhere near ready just yet. Instead, they rely on several indicators on a web page to tell them what the photo is all about. One of these is, as you might expect, the filename of the photo. You should never upload photos to your website with the standard camera-applied filename, like DSC_9764.jpg! This tells Google nothing at all and its content.

When Google knows more about the content of your image, it can include it in Image Search (click the image tab at the top of a Google search page), and sometimes the top images even show right at the head of a regular search page. Not only does it help people find your photos directly, but it also helps Google understand the content of the page that you posted the photo on, helping that page show up higher in regular search results for the subject.

Dash or Underscore?

Instead of the default filename, you should be describing the contents of the image in 3-8 words. Importantly, you should be separating the words in your filename with a dash (hyphen), and not an underscore!

(these-are-dashes)

(these_are_underscores)

The inner workings of Google’s search engine algorithm are a closely guarded secret, but every now and again we get a little snippet of detail from one of their representatives on the Google Webmasters blog. For some reason there’s a lot of misinformation circulating around the web on this topic, but Google’s Matt Cutts, has clearly stated that dashes (hyphens) are the way to go on this one. Whilst Matt Cutts does say that the SEO difference between the two is relatively minor, that means there is a difference.

Straight From The Horse’s Mouth – Dash NOT Underscore!

Examples

– WRONG -> DSC_9807.jpg

This tells Google nothing at all.

– WRONG -> blackcat.jpg

Blackcat is not a word.

– WRONG -> black-cat.jpg

Whilst this technically does describe the image (assuming it is actually a black cat), have a think about how many photos of a black cat you’d be putting yourself up against on the internet? Millions, I would imagine.

– WRONG -> a-black-cat-under-a-red-car.jpg

There’s no need to include stop words in your filename (a, the, it, to, etc.). Keep it short and simple.

– WRONG -> black_cat_under_red_car.jpg

Nope, the underscore isn’t a recognized word separator. To Google, this just reads as blackcatunderredcar.jpg! No good.

– CORRECT -> black-cat-under-red-car.jpg

Now we’re getting somewhere! Descriptive, and with the correct separators and no stop words.

Use It To Your Advantage

Since the filename helps Google understand the content of the page that the photo is on, you can use this to boost your search rankings for specific topics.

Example

You are a wedding photographer from San Francisco and on the About page of your website, there is a headshot of you next to your biography.

WRONG -> joe-blogs-portrait.jpg

CORRECT -> joe-bloggs-san-francisco-wedding-photographer.jpg.

Should You Rename Existing Images?

If you’re using a photo portfolio service like Photoshelter, SmugMug (get a 20% discount here), or Zenfolio, with hundreds or thousands of images, there’s little point renaming all of those files to make the names descriptive. There are obviously some organizational benefits to a photographer’s standard archive file naming scheme when photos are hosted in large volumes. Hopefully with these kinds of online portfolio archive services, you’re making use of all the other SEO options to optimize them.

The ideal setup is to use a blogging platform like WordPress, to create a new blog post every time you upload a new collection of images to your archive or online print store. In that blog post, you include a few of the images from the collection, and those are the images that you optimize with a proper name for SEO purposes. With properly optimized page content, and images, you’ll rank higher in more search results and bring people to the blog post. That’s when you can let them know that a full collection can be viewed on your archive site, or prints purchased from your print store.

But what if you’ve got existing blog images that weren’t correctly named? WordPress doesn’t natively offer a way to rename images, but you can use the plug Media File Renamer. What you have to remember, though, is that the filename is part of the direct URL to that image. If you do decide to change the filename, you’ll be altering the URL and it will reset any SEO juice that this image might have already gathered over time.

If you already have images that show up often in Google Image searches, you definitely don’t want to go renaming these ones. Choose wisely when tackling this question… my thought is that if you have a relatively new blog of only a few months old, you can rename the files with this plugin and probably get more long term benefit from it than short term disadvantage. For older blogs, it’s probably not worthwhile.

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Photo of author
Professional photographer based in Yukon, Canada, and founder of Shutter Muse. His editorial work has been featured in publications all over the world, and his commercial clients include brands such as Nike, Apple, Adobe and Red Bull.

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87 thoughts on “Image SEO – How To Name Your Files”

  1. What about ? ->
    black cat under red car.jpg

    Does this reduce Google juice?

    I realize programs like photoshop when you “save for web” add hypens/dashes into image names. But I often change the name of images in the Apple “finder” before loading into WordPress and have put spaces into them instead of hyphens.

    Reply
    • A space is not recommended because in the code, a space gets replaced by %20. If anyone copies the URL, this coding may or may not get translated correctly. So your code would be a%20black%20cat%20under%20red%20car.jpg It’s hard to be definitive about what effect that would have on SEO, but from a usability standpoint it’s not good. We always want to encourage people to share links, because that brings us great Google juice, and that’s why it’s best to select simple, clear URLs for posts. The same goes for images.

      Reply
  2. What about naming multiple photos in a blog post? For instance, I just compiled a post with 14 photos about a nursery I decorated. Every image can’t be named girl-nursery.jpg. Is it ok to add a number in there such as 01-girl-nursery.jpg, 02-girl-nursery.jpg etc.?

    Reply
    • You could add a number if you wanted to do it quickly, but it would be even better to be more descriptive. For example, there must be things in the nursery that are also in the photos? girl-nursery-white-crib for example. Girl-nursery-stuffed-animals as another.

      Reply
    • You should keep the names reasonable short because it keeps them instantly readable. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to read a 20-word filename that’s separated by hyphens, but it’s it isn’t instantaneous recognition as it can be with, say, 5 words. I don’t believe Google punishes longer names unless it thinks you are simply keyword spamming, but we also want to strive to make things easy for a human user as well, not just a Google bot.

      Reply
  3. How to adding a main KW and a photo description ? EX. If I have a photo about the pyramids and my KW is Egypt Packages. Shall I write it : Egypt-travel-packages-Giza- Pyramids ?

    Reply
  4. Nice article. I would like to add some value to this post. Recently I came across a very nice WP plugin. The new bloggers flood their blog with all the high-resolution images to make it nice and attractive. But for the matter of fact, that reduces the speed of the website and it takes a lot of time to load which hampers the user experience.

    Use ‘wp smush’ to reduce the size of images and keep the quality good. The free version will allow 50 images to smush at a time, then you need to start the process again for next 50 images. Premium version will take this restriction off.

    Hope this is one of the nice ways to optimize an image.

    Reply
  5. What if there are a series of photos that I want to show up in a specific order (ex. Before, During, After construction). Should I name all files the same and add a sequential # on the end ? For instance: New-Home-01.jpg, New-Home-02.jpg — even if there are different Pics from Inside and Outside and Different Rooms or Home Features ? Or is it better to add a # to the Beginning of the File and be more descriptive of what is in each image ? Ex: 01-Cape-Cod-Front.jpg, 02-Master-Bedroom.jpg

    Reply
  6. hey thx for your nice article.

    my question is : how should i rename large numbers of files (images).

    imagine ill putt up large sets of images for each wedding ill show like 50-75 images per wedding

    so ill think about a system which includes different locations and same locations

    like

    wedding-photographer-001-location-(3words which describe the image)-brandname.jpg

    what would you suggest ?

    my main goal is to get found for wedding photographer location not brand name.

    im not sure where to put the “numbers” and how to overcome double content (like beeing in the same location more times) and how long the filename can be

    i think about

    001-wedding-photographer-location-(3-words-which describe the image).jpg

    OR

    001-(words which describe the image)-wedding-photographer-location.jpg

    AND

    if i should include the brand name (ever/for all/ for some)

    what do you think ?

    Reply
  7. I think that you should take this idea: 001-wedding-photographer-location-(3-words-which describe the image).jpg , but put the number on the end not the beginning, it looks nicer. I would only include the brand if you think people are directly searching for your brand or your name. I usually include my surname because it is short, but if you have a multiple word brand name I probably wouldn’t do it. If someone searches your brand name, they will hopefully get your website as the first hit anyway.

    Reply
    • Thank you very much. The Number problem …

      … numbers at the end and i cant sort the images … because some words change ..

      so ill think ill have to compromise

      wedding-photographer-location-001-(3-words-which describe the image).jpg

      have a nice day

      Reply
  8. Hi, does all your descriptive words have to be in lowercase or can you start each word with a capital?
    How long before Google actually picks this info up??

    Thanks,
    Derek

    Reply
    • It doesn’t matter if it’s lowercase or not. As for how long it takes them… it varies from site to site. If you regularly update your site, Google’s bots will come back to crawl your site more often. Sometimes as much as every day. If you rarely blog, or make edits to your site, it might take them weeks. Having said that, even when they do pick up the information, it can then take even longer to rise up through the search rankings. It really depends on how highly they rank your site in the first place. There’s a lot more info about this in my SEO ebook: http://shuttermuse.com/store/seo-for-photographers

      Reply
  9. Thank you for the great article, Dan! How about using “+” next to keywords within a file name, just as it is done in AdWords, in order to encompass variations of that keyword?

    Reply
  10. Hi Dan,
    Thanks for the article. It’s very useful.
    How about using the website name in each image?
    Eg. “mydomain.com-black-car.jpg” , “mydomain.com-20-inch-tyres.jpg” …. and so on….
    How does this impact my website?

    Reply
    • A few things to consider here, that make me think it’s not a good idea. Firstly, using the “dot” in the filename might cause issues because it’s not a recommended separator. As mentioned in the post, you should use a “dash”. But you also have to ask yourself what is the benefit? I do sometimes leave my name in my image filenames because dancarr is quite short, but if your name is long, and your website name is even longer, it’s only going to make your filenames look extremely long and complicated. There won’t be any particular SEO benefit to using your URL in the filename, so the only potential reason you might do it is so that someone can potentially find out who took the photo a little easier if the image gets take an put by someone else on another website. Of course then, they might change the filename anyway!

      Reply
  11. So should I name the images as you describe while they are on my PC, and then upload them to my site? If this is the case this is what I have done. When I have uploaded them, I wanted to check, so I right click on the picture and scroll down to ‘inspect’ which appears to bring up the code to my site. However, it still just shows a load of, what is jargon to me, for eg. //cdn-cms.f-static.com/uploads/154641316545ba154.jpg
    Is this just how the site translates the image for website purposes, and Google still reads the name I gave it?
    I built my site on a web builder site.
    Thanks for all the info BTW, much appreciated.

    Reply
    • Which builder are you using? It sounds like your builder might be renaming the files when it creates compressed versions. That would not be good…

      Reply
  12. Thank you for posting this. The Matt Cutts video was great to see.

    Can’t you now change WordPress image numbers under file library? It looks like it to me, but maybe that’s inferior to renaming the file before uploading?

    Reply
  13. I have a question and I can’t find an answer anywhere! I’m having so much trouble naming my images as they are all of the same thing! I’ll explain..
    I am ahair extension artist, all my photos are of clients before and after shots of basically just hair! So if I can’t use their names for privacy issues, any suggestions on how to name them? Only so many times you can say before long brunette, after medium length blonde, Great Lengths long blonde, etc.. I have thousands of these. Help please!

    Reply
    • What a great question! The biggest thing you want to avoid is having files with the same name on the same page. The next thing you can do is potentially add a location in there? Perhaps a county or city name if you are trying to target a specific market? Also think about event name like “prom”, “wedding”, “party”. Now add all those together and you’ll have WAY more combinations.

      Reply
  14. This is a brilliant article! Renaming as I type – will in a mo. Should I have my name first – you said you put yours in there without a space, then the subject. I am putting up some celebs that I shot in the past and curious as to whether I should have their names before mine for google!

    Reply
  15. In my CMS, when uploading files they automatically get friendly URLs. So for instance the file named Forrester report.pdf converts to forrester-report.pdf. Any copyin of the URL displaying the file will look good and will work for sure. So are there any other drawbacks? Wouldn’t it be more wise for me to keep file names as user friendly as possiblle (people will probably search for Forrester report, not forrester-report). WIthin what other areas will leaving out hyphens affect my SEO and findability when it comes to files and assets?

    Reply
    • You don’t need to worry about that. Google has said that the dash is an accepted separator. forrestor report and forrestor-report are essentially the same thing.

      Reply
  16. Late post : )

    I have images that lend to the value proposition I’m trying to convey but aren’t really directly related to SEO useful words. Should I “blatantly’ (I tell you now, I will have no shame.) just name the images for good SEO – for the page as a whole ?

    Reply
  17. What about Black-Cat-Under-Red-Car.jpg vs. black-cat-under-red-car.jpg? Do capital letters or lowercase matter?

    Reply
  18. Usually I never comment on blogs but your article is so convincing that
    I never stop myself to say something about it. You’re doing a great
    job Man,Keep it up.

    Reply
  19. Hi. Small business here, no question, just wanted to say that a clear, easy to read & understand blog was just what I needed this morning. Naming all my photos for my website and am now totally clear on what I need to do. Thanks 🙂

    Reply
  20. Hi. Thank you for very good article 🙂 I’ve been blogging now for a year and, of course, have made the mistake of naming images with underscore… I’ve recently changed to dash, but I still have trouble with Google image search – for some reason my blog’s images do not show up in searches. I have tried to use every trick I know- e.g. naming (currently with dash), alt-name, titles, keywords. I cannot understand what can be the problem. I write my blog with Blogger and the images are saved in Blogger’s own system. I would appreciate any help and thoughts about what might be the problem and if there is something I could still do…
    BTW, I have noticed that the images show up in searches somehow wrong. For example I tried image search with “lumineiti” (which means snow lady) and all of a sudden Google image search showed images from my halloween ghost castle! I.e. another blog post with completely different subject.Weird?!
    Google search as such is working ok, i.e. my blog writings do show up in google searches. The problem is with images.
    Thank you in advance!

    Reply
  21. Hi Dan, one more question 🙂
    I’m a wedding photographer, so the question is- how to increase juice from photos but without spam? for now they all are named “01,02, etc”, but thanks to you i’m thinking how to rename them properly.

    For example: i will rename photos of Belinda & Matt wedding in Shanghai- belinda-mat-shanghai-wedding-1,2,3,4etc.

    The critical question is- can/should I use the word “wedding”- in all galleries, blog post on website? I’m worried it counts for spam..

    Reply
  22. Hi Dan,

    I’m building a WordPress website for a photographer. She photographs families, maternity/babies, special occasions and boudoir. What would you recommend for a naming scheme? I was thinking of using the category name first, i.e. family-*-*.jpg, but I’m not sure where to go from there. For example, If all the family photos are taken outside and locally (same town or location) and include the same family members (mom, dad, son, daughter) or shots of the same configurations (mom & son, brother & sister), how do I differentiate them? I want a naming scheme that’s easy to implement because of the volume of photos and because she’ll eventually be naming and uploading them herself.

    Thanks!

    Reply
    • Well I think it somewhat depends whether you really want them all to be found in Google. The way you describe a “large volume” of photos makes it sound like you’re trying to optimize every photo from many family photoshoots. Is that the case?

      Reply
    • I don’t think there is a known limit, but if the title is just full of keyword stuffing then I’m sure that won’t be good. I think a small number of highly relevant words is better, in natural language.

      Reply
  23. Dan Carr, It is remarkable that you have returned to this post to answer questions posed to you, THREE years later. This is such a rarity. Thank you for your informative article and your continued attention to your readers.

    Reply
  24. Thank you for the information. Unfortunately, we were told to use the underscore when naming photos for our website. So my question would be… I think I have to many to change so I will leave the existing photos as-is. But should I use the dash from here out when uploading new photos to our website? Or should the entire website be consistent? Thank you in advance.

    Reply
    • no, because it’s not what people search for. If you search to buy something on the internet you don’t Google “buy red t-shirt with cat on” – you just google “red t-shirt with cat on” right?

      Reply
  25. Dear Dan THANKSSSS for a great article and all the comments! I would really appreciate your opinion about my issue.
    I have a brand LEPSIFUL (meaning Beautiful) and selling premium silk scarves with my hand darwn design, digitally printed in Como, Italy.
    I am going to rename all the photos on my website due to SEO. I will write down a few examples. Could you have a look if this is OK?

    Lepsiful-OceanBlue-Silk-Oversized-Scarf-Women.jpg (women oversized silk scarf)
    Lepsiful-OceanBlue-Silk-Pocket-Scarf-Men.jpg (men pocket silk scarf)
    Lepsiful-OceanBlue-Silk-Oversized-Scarf-Women-Promo-ValentineDay.jpg (promo about women silk scarf)
    Lepsiful-OceanBlue-Silk-Pocket-Scarf-Men-Promo-ValentineDay.jpg (promo about men silk scarf)
    Lepsiful-OceanBlue-Silk-Scarf-Prints.jpg (ocean blue scarf print)
    Lepsiful-OceanBlue-Silk-Scarf-Banner.jpg (ocean blue scarf is presented on webpage banner)

    is it ok to start every photo with the brand name-Lepsiful?

    what about the photo gallery EX.: I have 4 photos about Lepsiful-OceanBlue-Silk-Oversized-Scarf-Women. Is it correct to name:
    Lepsiful-OceanBlue-Silk-Oversized-Scarf-Women-1.jpg
    Lepsiful-OceanBlue-Silk-Oversized-Scarf-Women-2.jpg
    Lepsiful-OceanBlue-Silk-Oversized-Scarf-Women-3.jpg

    Dan Thank you in advance! I know it is a long question and you already answer similar ones, but I really want to be sure, because I want to do it good this time.

    Wish you all the best,Petra

    Reply
    • You have to remember that ultimately you are trying to name something in a way that is similar to what people will be searching for. I don’t know your business, but are people really going to be searching for “oversized” scarf? I would try and write it more naturally. Lepsiful-womens-oceanblue-silk-scarf.

      Reply
  26. Hey Dan!

    just one more question;)

    what about the scarves name?

    better -OceanWaves- OR -Ocean-Waves-
    -FlowerLover- -Flower-Lover-
    -WildTiger- -wild-Tiger-

    Thanksssss,
    Petra

    Reply
  27. We have always renamed our jpg images before uploading to our blog, but we didn’t realize we shouldn’t be using special characters like accents. Since we have a travel blog, most of our photos are from other countries, so the names have lots of these characters in the jpg files. We currently have 2500+ images on our 4-year old site.

    What’s weird is they’ve only recently started causing errors in sites like GTMetrix. The characters are now being replaced by characters like “%.”

    Do you have any idea how we might fix this?! Maybe a plugin we could install or a snippet of code somewhere? It’s really bogging down our site speed and causing lots of errors. 🙁

    TIA!

    Carrie @ Two Small Potatoes

    Reply
    • Hi Carrie. Sounds like a problem indeed. I’m afraid I don’t know what to suggest. There might be a file renaming plugin out there but i don’t have experience with one. The other issue you might wan to keep in mind is that if you change the filenames, the old images will 404. If you want to keep any SEO juice that they did build up in the past, you’ll want to add 301 redirects for all images you change the filenames for. Painstaking process. For the redirection side of things there is a great plugin simply called Redirection, and it allows you to create bulk redirects from text files.

      Reply
  28. I read the article and all the questions and responses and comments and am still unsure how to proceed with naming the image files for the WordPress website I’m building. It’s for my husband’s remodeling business. So there are different locations and, typically, different projects at each location. Let’s take as an example a bank-owned foreclosure on a Sycamore Lane, exterior and interior work. For a shot of the newly built deck, I was going to mark it “rebuilt-wood-deck-metal-railing.” That seems like it would perhaps cause it to come up in relevant image searches. But should I preface that with anything more general? The name of the company is too long, unless I were to abbreviate it. But perhaps the larger project, like “Sycamore,” to where it would read, “Sycamore-rebuilt-wood-deck-metal-railing.” Is there any reason to do that externally, or would it just be for my own purposes, for organization? Also, let’s say there are multiple shots of that same deck. I should forego numbers, right, in favor of more descriptive text, like that girl nursery question above? Like, “Sycamore-rebuilt-wood-deck-metal-railing-steps?” Lastly, should I even be adding words like “rebuilt” or “remodeled” or “repaired,” as that is the very nature of the trade? I guess I should add that my purpose for the photos is to showcase his work to prospective clients in our rural area, though if increased traffic to the site overall, by, say, people looking to get inspiration for rehabbing their houses gives us a bigger presence/better search rankings, great! Any input would be much appreciated!

    Reply
    • I think you need to circle back to a basic question here. What is it that you are hoping people will search for and then subsequently find his business? That’s basically all we’re doing here: Trying to guess what your potential clients will be searching for. If you think a potential client might be searching for “rebuilt metal railing” then that is what you should be naming it. In your Sycamore example, I highly doubt that anyone is ever going to search specifically for images of rebuilt metal rails from Sycamore street. But if they are looking for something local they may very well put the town name in there. Most people don’t search for businesses they don’t know by using a street name. Make sense?

      Reply
      • I think I follow. I’m hoping to draw someone within reasonable distance of us looking to have some remodel work done. Our town is very small, and it is split across counties, so I might just be better to use the state, Michigan, or region, though even that is complicated, as we are about halfway between two major cities, Grand Rapids and Lansing. And perhaps I should use fewer descriptors, as people are probably simply searching for a construction expert and unlikely to qualify a style or material. So to return to that deck photo. Perhaps “Michigan-remodel-new-deck.” And for multiple images of it, I could add a word or two, like “open-railing” or “cedar.” Do you think I’m on the right track now? Thank you so very much for your guidance!

        Reply
        • It seems that Google likes real language these days so michigan-deck-remodelling would probably be better. Someone will search for a new deck, or a remodelled deck, but not likely both. Are you sure people will even use the word remodel? Not renovation?

          Reply
          • Hmm, OK, by real language you mean a logical phrase one might utter as opposed to a choppy list of keywords? I’ll have to ponder what exactly people would type into a search engine, whether remodel or renovate or repair or (new) construction. I suppose if I use multiple images of the same deck, I could try out more than one angle, say, one ‘renovated,’ for those needing resurfacing, and one ‘new,’ for the others, to cast the net wider. Nearly ready to name those files, thanks to you! I so appreciate your responses!

            Reply
            • Well yeah I just mean don’t do things like “deck-renovation-new-remodel”. That’s called keyword stuffing and they don’t like it. Using different photos with different keywords is a reasonable plan I think.

              Reply
  29. Hi. Thank you for the great article.

    Do capitalizing letters and putting spaces in downloadable files (.doc, .pdf, etc.) matter? I’m trying to make the file name pop and be most useable by the recipient. If would be great if it could look something like:

    Birds of North America Field Guide.pdf

    That being said, a stable website is the most important thing so if it’s better to use dashes and lowercases, then I will.

    Thanks!

    Reply
    • I don’t think this really makes a difference. Google isn’t going to be able to index the contents of a PDF file anyway so you should pay more attention to the page on which you are offering the download link. Personally I would still use dashes, though. I think spaces in files names can be problematic for other reasons.

      Reply
  30. Hi Dan, SO awesome that you are still answering questions on this post. Maybe I will be the first for 2020! I’m building my photography website and I want to make sure I use the correct keywords in the file names. I watched the video with this post and it said that dashes separate and underscores join. So I want to include my state since I’m willing to travel but also want to be specific to my town. So would I do

    North_Carolina-Winston_Salem-Newborn-Photographer 001 or just use all dashes even though NC and Winston-Salem go together? Thank you so much-Krystle

    Reply
  31. Hi!
    Thank you for all the helpful info.

    I still have a question, didn’t find answer in the comments: Im building a lingerie website and I have 18k products, from which 7k might be bra’s for example, 5k panties and so on.
    What is the solution in this case?

    Im using shopify and currently working in adding products manually, you can imagine the amount of work it is to be done + one more task now to rename the images.

    How should i do?
    The numbers will be to long…I dont want to work for nothing…
    ex: bra-push-up-underwear-5611(or 9645) are this numbers still good for the SEO?

    + the ALT TEXT, which is different…(here what do you think, should we use just tags like we do in renaming or a much nicer text with tags included)?

    Thank you

    Reply
  32. this is 1 of the greatest post i ever seen online, thanks dan carr, i hav tried to find out if u hav any channel on youtube but none has found (theres another dan carr (also with beard) but thats not u) and this makes me feel sad.

    Reply
  33. I just wanted to stop by and thank you for the information in this post. I was very clear and concise, and I really appreciate you taking the time to write it up.

    Reply
  34. Hello Dan
    I have recently set up a new website (theprintsmith.co.uk), using squarespace. All pretty good for me as a small start up business and Squarespace seems to to a great job of automatically optimising images I upload. However, it puts a plus sign + between the words – I’m sure squarespace would do anything to negatively affect SEO performance but what are your thoughts on this – example: gold+foiled+wedding+invitation.jpg ?

    Many thanks

    Reply
  35. Hi Dan,
    Thank you for the great article. I’m a Wordpress developer and when files are uploaded to the media library, several different sizes of the same photo are created. This leads to photos having the image size as a file name suffix (i.e. cat-under-red-car_400x600.jpg). I know the underscore is bad. If I could change the underscore to a dash would having the 400×600 in the filename still be bad for SEO?
    I appreciate your time!

    Reply
    • I think Google is smart enough to just ignore the appended image sizes, so I don’t think it matters whether you have a dash or an underscore there.

      Reply
  36. Hi Dan
    Naming photos for SEO in French is a real stuff. French speaking users are not google bots letters like “èéê” will all be written “e” for the bot . For some users making basic mistakes is unworthy .How do you think we could handle this stuff to make it both Google and French juices?

    Reply
  37. Hi Dan,
    Thank you very much for your clear presentation. I’ll start renaming my ‘underscore’ files. Before I do it would be nice to get your thoughts on a few points. (1) in relation to SEO how do you rate descriptive ‘alt’ tags vs descriptive file names? (2) Regarding copyright, I’m thinking of including my name in the file name. Something like: copyright-my-name-galleryx-image01 with a short image description in the ‘alt’ tag. What do you think?
    Many thanks, Michael

    Reply
  38. Dan,

    You are amazing! Such hi-quality information! Plus some of the people who commented gave great info too. If I could, I would send you a gift (like a gift card to B & H Photo in NYC) 🙂 I create my own websites on WordPress for small businesses that I own. I mostly taught myself. I’m a lifelong learner and always taking classes on digital marketing, blogging, and business. Kudos for teaching a “class” on your blog.

    Thank-You-Thank-You-Thank-You! 🙂

    Reply
  39. Amazing! So happy I found you. I haven’t started my website as such yet, and still deciding which platform to use, but I am putting all my photos together and was wondering how to put them together so that I could bulk upload them, or do I have to upload one by one. Thank you.

    Reply

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