I was posed with a recent request to allow my content editor to edit the alt text of all the images in Umbraco to help with SEO rankings.

Out of the box, Umbraco has no straight forward way of doing this and some quick searches on Our resulted in suggestions of adding an extra text field to the Image data type. This could be an acceptable solution for single images however there are many instances on my site where i’m using the Multiple Media Picker, in which case this approach wouldn’t work.

To add to the problem, there was a requirement to make the alt tags multi-lingual – so of course, Dictionary Items come to the rescue.

Up until now, I had been setting the alt attributes of all images to use the Name property – @image.Name

These have all now been refactored to use a Dictionary Item which is set as the Name property and fallback to the actual Name property when a translation is not available, as below.

alt="@Umbraco.Field('#' + @image.Name, altText: @image.Name)"