Altomatic for Craft CMS

Altomatic generates accessible, high-quality ALT text for image assets using OpenAI, Google Vision, AWS Rekognition, or Azure Vision. It integrates into the Craft CP with a per-asset action, bulk tools, and a dashboard so editors can see coverage and activity at a glance.

Features

• Per-asset button on the Asset edit screen that queues ALT generation for that image
• “Generate ALT for All” toolbar button on Assets index
• Bulk element action for selected assets
• Dashboard with totals: images, with ALT, without ALT
• Recent activity log: who queued what, for which assets
• Clear guardrails and error messages when provider credentials are missing
• Queue jobs with chunking for performance
• Fine-grained permissions:
  • altomatic:generate
  • altomatic:settings

Requirements

• PHP 8.2+
• Craft CMS 5.0+
• Guzzle 7.8+

Enable the plugin

1. Go to Control Panel → Settings → Plugins and enable Altomatic.
2. A new Altomatic item will appear in the left sidebar with Dashboard and Settings.

Configuration

Open Altomatic → Settings and:

1. Choose a Provider: OpenAI, Google Vision, AWS Rekognition, or Azure Vision.
2. Enter credentials for the provider (or reference environment variables).
3. Decide whether to Overwrite existing values. When enabled, existing Alternative Text will be replaced.

Environment variables

# OpenAI
ALTOMATIC_OPENAI_API_KEY="..."

# Google Vision
ALTOMATIC_GOOGLE_API_KEY="..."

# AWS Rekognition
ALTOMATIC_AWS_KEY="..."
ALTOMATIC_AWS_SECRET="..."
ALTOMATIC_AWS_REGION="us-east-1"

# Azure Vision
ALTOMATIC_AZURE_ENDPOINT="https://<your-endpoint>.cognitiveservices.azure.com/"
ALTOMATIC_AZURE_KEY="..."

How it works

• Altomatic requests a concise description of the image from your selected provider.
• The result is trimmed and normalized, then saved to the native Alternative Text field ($asset->alt).
• If Overwrite existing values is off and Alternative Text already exists, the asset is skipped.

Using Altomatic

Per-asset

Open any image asset in the CP. In the sidebar’s Altomatic panel, click Generate ALT with Altomatic. This queues a job and refreshes the page once it’s queued.

Bulk (selected assets)

From the Assets index, select images and choose Generate ALT (Altomatic) from element actions.

Generate for all

On /admin/assets, use the Generate ALT for All (Altomatic) button in the toolbar. The plugin queues jobs in batches to avoid long-running requests.

Dashboard

Go to Altomatic → Dashboard to see:

• Total images
• How many have Alternative Text
• How many are missing it
• A recent actions log with user, action, asset ID, counts, and timestamps

Permissions

Grant these to the appropriate user groups or roles:

• altomatic:generate — allow per-asset, bulk, and “all images” actions
• altomatic:settings — allow editing provider settings and overwrite behavior

Troubleshooting

• “Altomatic is not configured” in the sidebar Add the required API keys or env vars in Altomatic → Settings. The warning lists what’s missing.

• No ALT is written after a generation job Check the dashboard log for the action, confirm provider credentials, and verify the job queue is running.

• Network or provider errors Review Craft logs for provider error messages. Most exceptions are logged with helpful details.

Security & Privacy

• Only the minimum data required to generate image descriptions is sent to the selected provider.
• If an image URL is not public, the plugin sends an inline base64 representation instead (when supported).