Café photos on your website: what Google's image guidance says about alt text, filenames and formats

Google's image guidance says the most important attribute for giving an image more metadata is the alt text, the text that describes the image. It tells you to write useful, information-rich alt text and to avoid filling it with keywords. Google says this keyword stuffing "may cause your site to be seen as spam". Filenames give Google "very light clues", so use short, descriptive ones. Wherever possible, put each photo near relevant text, and embed it with a standard HTML image element. I set out each point below as Google gives it, then show café examples of our own, marked as ours.

How does Google find and read the photos on a café's site?

Google says standard HTML image elements help crawlers find and process images. Its page says: "Google can find images in src attribute of <img> element (even when it's a child of other elements, such as the <picture> element). Google doesn't index CSS images." Google's page gives this as the good case: <img src="puppy.jpg" alt="A golden retriever puppy" />. The bad case it gives is <div style="background-image:url(puppy.jpg)">A golden retriever puppy</div>. For a café, our reading: a photo set as a background in the page's style is a CSS image, which Google says it doesn't index.

Two more ways Google learns about images are on the same page. One is an image sitemap: "You can provide the URL of images we might not have otherwise discovered by submitting an image sitemap." The other is the page around the photo. Google's page says: "Google extracts information about the subject matter of the image from the content of the page, including captions and image titles. Wherever possible, make sure images are placed near relevant text and on pages that are relevant to the image subject matter."

What should the alt text on a café photo say?

In Google's words, it should be "useful, information-rich content" in context of the page. Google's page says: "The most important attribute when it comes to providing more metadata for an image is the alt text (text that describes an image), which also improves accessibility for people who can't see images on web pages, including users who use screen readers or have low-bandwidth connections." It adds: "When writing alt text, focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and is in context of the content of the page. Avoid filling alt attributes with keywords (also known as keyword stuffing) as it results in a negative user experience and may cause your site to be seen as spam."

Google gives four examples for one photo. Missing alt text is bad: <img src="puppy.jpg"/>. Keyword stuffing is bad: a long string that starts "puppy dog baby dog pup pups puppies doggies" and ends "cheap dogfood puppy food". Better: alt="puppy". Best: alt="Dalmatian puppy playing fetch". In our reading, the best one says what is in the picture and what is happening.

Here is the same idea for a café. This is our example, not Google's. For a photo of a flat white on a counter, alt="Flat white on the counter" follows the style of Google's best example. A string of every drink, street name and "best coffee" phrase in the alt attribute is the kind of stuffing Google warns about. Google's page also says alt text "is useful as anchor text if you decide to use an image as a link".

Do filenames matter for café photos?

A little. Google's page says: "the filename can give Google very light clues about the subject matter of the image." It continues: "When possible, use filenames that are short, but descriptive. For example, my-new-black-kitten.jpg is better than IMG00023.JPG. Avoid using generic filenames like image1.jpg, pic.gif, 1.jpg when possible."

Our example, not Google's: a photo of a flat white at the counter could be named flat-white-counter.jpg rather than a camera name like IMG_4021.JPG. Google calls the clue "very light", so in our view you need not spend a morning renaming files. Name new photos sensibly when you upload them.

Which image formats does Google support, and does speed matter?

Google Search supports these formats in the src attribute of an img element: BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, WebP, SVG, and AVIF. Its page adds: "It's also a good idea to have the extension of your filename match with the file type."

On speed, the section "Optimize for speed and quality" says: "High-quality photos appeal to users more than blurry, unclear images. Also, sharp images are more appealing to users in the result thumbnail and can increase the likelihood of getting traffic from users. That said, images are often the largest contributor to overall page size, which can make pages slow and expensive to load. Make sure to apply the latest image optimization and responsive image techniques to provide a high quality and fast user experience." The next sentence reads: "Analyze your site speed with PageSpeed Insights and visit our Why does speed matter? to learn about best practices and techniques to improve website performance."

For the preview image, Google's page says to avoid "a generic image (for example, your site logo) or an image with text in the schema.org markup or og:image meta tag". It says to choose "an image that's relevant and representative of the page".

What about the menu?

Do not leave the menu as a photo. This is our check, not Google's image guidance. Our free check lists "A menu an assistant can reach", and describes it like this: "Your home page, or the first link that says "menu", must be a page with at least five prices written as text. A PDF or a photo of the menu does not count, because most assistants skip them, and a Menu link that leads nowhere does not either." That is our rule for AI assistants, and Google did not say it. The check does not look at your photos or their alt text. For the title and description of your pages, see our article on titles and meta descriptions.

Sources

• Google Search Central, Google image SEO best practices, last updated 2026-03-02 UTC, read 2 November 2026.
• Cupán Studio, Is my café website AI ready? (cupanstudio.com/check), the six things it checks, read 2 November 2026.

This is a summary of Google Search Central documentation read on 2 November 2026, not legal or tax advice. The café examples are ours and are not from Google. Cupán Studio builds websites for cafés in Ireland.