Image Voice vs AltKing

AltKing is free, it has 188 reviews at five stars, and it carries the Built for Shopify badge. Before anything else on this page: for a lot of stores it is the right answer, and we will show you how to tell whether yours is one of them.

What AltKing actually does

From its own App Store listing, its method is:

Create alt text using variables (variants, product title, type, tags)

That is a template. You choose the shape once — product title, then variant, then type — and AltKing fills it in across the catalogue and keeps it synced daily as you upload. It is fast, it is free, and it never writes anything strange, because it never writes anything new.

Here is what that produces for a product with six photographs:

alt="Moss Green Organic Cotton Tee - Small - T-Shirts"
alt="Moss Green Organic Cotton Tee - Small - T-Shirts"
alt="Moss Green Organic Cotton Tee - Small - T-Shirts"

Six images. One sentence, three times over, and it is the sentence already in the <h1>, the product title, and the breadcrumb.

When that is genuinely fine

If your product photography is packshots — same garment, white background, front and back — then the product title honestly is close to a description, the six photographs really do contain the same information, and paying anybody for something better is paying for a difference your customers will not experience.

If that is your store, install AltKing and stop reading. It is free and it is well built. We would rather you knew that than found out after paying us.

When it stops being fine

The moment your images carry information the title does not.

• A detail shot of the collar, the stitching, the hem
• The fabric close-up somebody zooms into before they buy
• On-model shots — fit, drape, scale against a person
• Lifestyle and in-context photography
• Anything in the theme: banners, sliders, section imagery, campaign art
• Every image where the reason you shot it was that the title was not enough

For those, a variable-built string is not a wrong description. It is not a description at all — it is the product title, announced again. A screen reader reads the same sentence six times. Google image search receives no information it did not already have from the page. An AI shopping agent parsing your catalogue as text sees one product attribute repeated, not six photographs.

A variable is not a description. That is the entire difference, and it is the only claim on this page you need to check.

What Image Voice does instead

It looks at the image. Every one, individually, and writes roughly 125 characters describing what is actually in the frame — which is also the length Shopify's own guidance recommends, against a hard field limit of 512.

alt="Moss-green organic cotton tee folded flat, showing the ribbed collar and
embroidered leaf at the hem"

Different image, different sentence. That is the whole product.

And before it writes anything, it grades what you already have — including whatever AltKing has been filling in — four ways: missing, junk, weak, good, with a sample you read yourself. A template-filled field counts as covered in every tool on the store. The audit is the thing that tells you whether covered and described are the same word in your catalogue.

The honest trade

We are the newer, unproven, paid one. That is the trade, stated plainly, and on a store full of packshots it is not a trade worth making.

What to do about it

Run the free audit on what AltKing has already written. No card, nothing written to your store, a graded answer on your own products in minutes.

You will find out in one number whether your photographs are carrying information your alt text is throwing away. If they are not, AltKing is free and you should keep it — and you will have that in writing from the people who would rather have sold you something.

AltKing's features, rating and pricing above were taken from its

App Store listing

on 4 September 2026 and may have changed since. Check the listing before you decide. AltKing is a trademark of its owner and this page is not affiliated with or endorsed by them.