Springnest Product Update: Let AI write your image alt tags

At a team meetup in Cape Town almost a year ago, we landed on one very clear value around how we believe AI should impact our customers: rather than taking away the essence of their marketing and content, it should first and foremost be used to do the heavy lifting of mundane, rudimentary, or technical tasks that traditionally take a lot of time or cause procrastination.

This month, we launched our first AI tool that honours that value: the Alt Tag Generator (we also paired this with some other highly requested updates to the file manager).

A quick refresher on why this matters. AI tools and search engines can analyse your images, but they can’t work out the exact context around them. ChatGPT can see an elephant. It doesn’t know it’s an image taken from a game drive vehicle in your reserve, or that every guest has access to this experience as part of your inclusive packages. An alt tag is the short line of text that tells it.

But it's not just about the description itself. There's value behind simply having these tags from a technical point of view. All tags have, for a long time, been a key signal used by search engines and, more recently, AI tools to rank, cite and recommend your website.

The problem has always been the effort. Most of the sites we host carry between 100 and 300 images (and some, much more). Opening each one and typing a description is the kind of task that lands on the too-hard pile. We get it, we’ve been there too. This is a perfect example of where AI can accurately do the repetitive work, while you focus on the more important part of your marketing and messaging.

How it works

You can now have AI analyse images in bulk in your File Manager and instantly generate suggested alt tags. You then have the option to edit or approve these before saving, condensing something that would traditionally take hours into minutes.

We also gave the File Manager an overdue tidy-up, based on requests from the Springnest Community

• Alt tags and captions are now separate fields. They used to share one text box. Alt tags describe the image for AI tools, search engines and screen readers. Captions are the line your guests read under an image in a gallery, written to sell the place, and they’re optional. Whatever you’d written before is now in your alt tags, so nothing was lost, and your captions start empty. Write captions works the same way as the alt tag tool.
• You’ll now see four tabs above your images, to help you find your way around. All, No alt text, No caption, and Not used. That last one shows images sitting in your File Manager that appear nowhere on your website, and it tends to surprise people
• You can now delete images in bulk. Tick them and click Delete. Before anything happens, Springnest shows you each image and lists every page it’s currently on, so you’ll know if you’re about to pull a photo off your Rooms page. This one is permanent; there’s no undo and no trash folder to fish it back out of.

Where to start

Visit Springnest Admin, click on the File Manager Tab, and look for the new “Write Alt text” AI Button.