Image SEO advice

Hi There.
I'm trying to update my portfolio site and have my illustrations in photo grids set to pop up images when clicked.
I see that I can add a title and caption which is all well and good except that the caption is also the alt text. Best practices for SEO and usability are that the Alt text should be descriptive of the image in case it doesn't load or is read by a screen reader. Having this as a caption seems somewhat redundant and not something I want displayed on the page.
Ideally I would only have the image title displayed and the alt text filled in but not displayed on the pop up. Unfortunately it only seems I have the option to not show the title and any Alt text I input is always displayed.
Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I could add Alt text to the image in this scenario?

What if you name your images? Select the image, select the Yellow Name Tag at the top of the screen, and Add a name (no extension, just the name). Then the photo will export with the name you have given it instead of the number assigned by Xara.

For example, for an illustration of a toad on a rock, use filename=toad on a rock press Add.

Thanks. That is a handy tip I didn't know about :-)
It doesn't solve the Alt Text issue though, as the description would not be used in cases of screen readers etc.

As long as I don't have a pop up image I can add appropriate Alt text. As soon as I want a pop up and add Alt text it is displayed as a caption whether I want it or not. The display cant be turned off.

It's got me scratching my head this one. I really don't know what to do for the best.

Ah, OK when Acorn or Egg or Siran swing through they will probably be able to offer a fix for this.

In the mean time I'll go through and add meaningful name tags. Thanks again for the tip Gary :-)

One word of caution regarding using named images, they are fine if you're not using variants but they mess up if you do use variants.

The Alt tag is used by Xara to give the image a title in highslide as the title tag is used by highslide to show "Click to close image ........"

Perhaps an alternative may be not to use highslide but pop-up layers.

Thanks Egg
I will be using variants. I thought that would be OK as long as I don't start the file names with a number?

I've been on to Xara about the Alt tag issue and hopefully it has forwarded as a feature request.

I had hoped not to use pop-up layers for this one as I have a lot of images and updating them in the future would be a pain.

I think I am probably going to go ahead without alt tags for my galleries and hop I won't be penalised.

This is what highslide says:

Quote:

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A great advantage of using the thumbnail's alt attribute for caption text, is that this is indexed by the search engines and associated with the image.

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The problem with using named images across variants is that Xara only generates one image whereas if you let Xara generate a numbered image it creates two separate images, one for the desktop & one for the mobile. You could work around it by using two image sets instead of one, so for example if you have an image named "myimage1desktop" you could make a copy and name this "myimage1mobile" and use them in the different variants. You could then give them filename=whatever etc. However this is a lot of additional work :(

I tried giving titles to images in pop-up layers but this doesn't work either.

LINK

Hmm. There is no point at all in making a non responsive site nowadays, so adding titles to images looks to be more trouble than its worth. Shame.

I guess I'll have to go the alt text route but not have it too obviously descriptive. At least that will be something a little indexable for my folio site.