altpilot

<sub>Made possible by


The team behind the magic
Simon Wesp Thomas Bendl Erich Bendl</sub>

Features ✨

• Dedicated UI for reviewing and managing generated alt text
• Inline frontend editing workflow
• Native Craft CMS integration for assets and action menus
• CLI commands for batch generation and maintenance
• Dynamic OpenAI rate-limit throttling for safer large runs
• Alt text status tracking across assets/sites
• Automatic generation for newly uploaded images

Requirements 📋

• Craft CMS 5.0.0+
• PHP 8.2+
• Valid OpenAI API key with access to a vision-capable model
• Reliable Craft queue runner for production (CRON or daemon-based)

altpilot uses Craft's queue system for generation jobs. For production, avoid relying only on browser-triggered queue execution.
Craft queue docs: https://craftcms.com/docs/5.x/system/queue.html#queue-runners

Installation 📦

Install from the Craft Plugin Store or via Composer.

Plugin Store

Install altpilot from the Craft Plugin Store

Composer

# from your Craft project root
composer require szenario/craft-altpilot && php craft plugin/install altpilot

Quickstart 🚀

1. Open Settings -> Plugins -> altpilot.
2. Add your OpenAI API key.
3. Select the asset volumes altpilot should process.
4. Run an initial generation pass:

php craft altpilot/missing

1. Make sure your queue runner is active:

php craft queue/run --verbose

Configuration 🛠️

altpilot settings are available in the Craft control panel:

• OpenAI API Key: API key used for generation requests
• Volumes: limits processing to selected asset volumes
• Inline Frontend Editing: toggles frontend overlay
• Prompt: base prompt sent with each image
• Prompt Role: optional role/context
• Prompt Focus: optional domain-specific focus
• OpenAI Model: model used for alt text generation (recommended: gpt-5-nano)

Model Recommendation and Cost

We recommend gpt-5-nano as the default model for most projects because it currently offers the best price/performance for alt text generation.

In our experience, generating 1,000 alt texts with gpt-5-nano costs less $0.7 USD.

Pricing is an estimate, not a guarantee. Actual cost depends on your prompt length, image complexity, response length, and OpenAI pricing changes over time.

Console Commands

altpilot includes CLI commands for batch operations:

# show available commands
php craft altpilot

# generate for one asset (optionally scoped by site)
php craft altpilot/asset <assetId> [--siteId=<id>]

# generate only missing alt text in configured volumes
php craft altpilot/missing [--siteId=<id>]

# regenerate all alt text (overwrites existing)
php craft altpilot/all [--siteId=<id>]

# regenerate all but optionally skip assets with manually set alt text
php craft altpilot/all [--siteId=<id>] --exclude-manual

# show status counts and queue overview
php craft altpilot/stats

Queue and Performance Notes

For stable production behavior:

• Run queue workers via CRON or a daemon process
• Monitor queue health during large generation batches
• Keep PHP execution limits realistic for external API calls (120s+ is safer than very low defaults)

Support

• Issues: https://github.com/szenario-fordesigners/altpilot/issues
• Source: https://github.com/szenario-fordesigners/altpilot
• Developer: https://www.szenario-design.com/