Prompt settings shape how the AI writes — its tone, vocabulary and the language it outputs in. The default prompt is generic on purpose: it works for any site without setup. Once your site has an established voice (e-commerce, travel blog, real-estate listings, photography portfolio), spending two minutes on a prompt addon makes every AI-generated alt text, title and keyword set feel like it was written by your team.
Where to find these
Prompt settings live in the AI Settings metabox on the main plugin dashboard — the same panel that holds the AI Model dropdown. Open Image SEO in the WordPress sidebar; AI Settings sits alongside the image table on that screen. There’s no separate settings page to navigate to.
Settings reference
Prompt options
| Setting | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|
Language
|
Your site language
|
The language the AI writes in. Alt text, titles and keywords come back in it; filenames follow it too, transliterated to lowercase Latin characters. Stored as a locale code in infyp_prompt_settings.language.
Values:
Any of the 133 locales in INFYP_Language_Manager
|
Prompt Add-on
|
(empty)
|
Free-form instructions added to every AI request. The field stores up to 1,000 characters (filter infyp_max_prompt_length); alt text, title and filename runs strip HTML from it and use the first 500. |
Enable custom prompt per image
|
Off
|
When on, Optimize with AI asks for one-off instructions before each run and the site-wide addon is skipped — the Prompt Add-on textarea is disabled while the box is checked.
Values:
On or Off
|
All 133 locales in the language list
Output language is independent of your WordPress admin language — run the admin in English and have the AI write alt text in German, Portuguese or Japanese. The dropdown is the plugin’s own list in INFYP_Language_Manager: 133 locale codes taken from the WordPress.org locale set, including the regional pairs (en_US and en_GB, pt_BR and pt_PT) and the formal variants (de_DE_formal, nl_NL_formal).
The list is static, so it does not pick up a new WordPress.org locale until a plugin release adds it. Display names are translatable, which is why the dropdown reads in whatever language your admin runs in.
The default is your site language
With nothing saved, generation uses your site language — whatever Settings → General → Site Language is set to — resolved to a language name for the prompt (de_DE becomes German). A fresh install on a German site writes German from the first call; since 1.0.6 the dropdown and the generated text always agree. If your site locale is not one of the 133, the fallback is en_US.
Locale codes by region and variant
| Feature | Example locale codes |
|---|---|
| Europe Western, Northern, Central and Southern Europe. | en_GB, de_DE, fr_FR, es_ES, it_IT, nl_NL, pt_PT, pl_PL, sv_SE, da_DK, nb_NO, fi, cs_CZ, sk_SK, hu_HU, ro_RO, bg_BG, el, hr, sr_RS, sl_SI, et, lv, lt_LT, uk |
| Americas North American English, Latin American Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese. | en_US, en_CA, pt_BR, es_AR, es_MX, es_CL, es_CO, es_VE, es_PE, es_UY, es_CR, es_DO, es_EC, es_GT, es_PR |
| Middle East and North Africa Right-to-left scripts plus Turkish and Moroccan Arabic. | ar, ary, he_IL, fa_IR, ckb, tr_TR |
| East and Southeast Asia Includes the three Chinese variants. | ja, ko_KR, zh_CN, zh_TW, zh_HK, th, vi, id_ID, ms_MY, tl, km, lo, my_MM |
| South Asia Indian-subcontinent languages. | hi_IN, bn_BD, ta_IN, ta_LK, te, mr, gu, pa_IN, ml_IN, kn, ne_NP, si_LK, as, snd, ur |
| Africa Sub-Saharan and North African languages in the list. | sw, am, af, kab |
| Formal, informal and orthographic variants Separate entries in the list, not a toggle on another locale. | de_DE_formal, de_CH_informal, nl_NL_formal, pt_PT_ao90 |
Open the Language dropdown in AI Settings for the whole list. It is sorted alphabetically by language name, so regional variants sit together — Spanish (Argentina) through Spanish (Venezuela) in one run.
The language is a request, not a guarantee
Your pick reaches the model as one line of the prompt (- Language: German). Nothing in the plugin checks the language of what comes back, so a model that is weak in a locale can answer in English or mix the two. Output also varies between runs. If a field comes back in the wrong language, run it again or pick a different model in AI Settings — then edit it by hand, which is faster than a third attempt.
Writing a good prompt addon
The prompt addon goes into every request as its own block, PRIMARY REQUIREMENTS (MUST FOLLOW), ahead of the length and format rules rather than at the end. Keep it to one or two concrete sentences: alt text, title and filename runs strip HTML from it and use the first 500 characters. Tell the AI what the site is about, what tone you want, and which terms to prefer. Don’t dictate output format — the plugin already constrains that.
What makes a prompt addon work
Anchor it in context the AI cannot infer from the image — your brand voice, audience, niche vocabulary. The AI already sees the image; it doesn’t need you to describe it. It does need you to say things like “casual second-person tone, US audience”, “prefer trade terms over consumer terms”, or “this is a luxury brand, avoid words like ‘cheap'”.
This is an e-commerce store selling outdoor gear to US hikers and campers. Use casual, second-person tone ("you'll love this jacket" not "customers will appreciate this jacket"). Prefer trade terms — softshell, 600-fill down, ripstop, packable — over generic descriptors. Avoid pricing language.This is a travel blog focused on slow travel in Southeast Asia. Write in a first-person, reflective tone. When you can identify a specific country or city in the image, name it. Prefer descriptive sensory language (smells, sounds, light) over generic adjectives like "beautiful" or "stunning".These are real-estate listing photos for residential properties in the UK. Use neutral, factual descriptions — no marketing superlatives. Identify the room type (living room, kitchen, master bedroom) and note observable features (sash windows, exposed brick, parquet floor). Comply with UK Trading Standards for property descriptions: only describe what is visible.Save and run one image to validate. If the output drifts from what you want, adjust the addon and re-run — there’s no penalty, you’re not retraining a model. Most sites land on a prompt addon they like in 2–3 iterations.
Per-image prompts
Checking Enable custom prompt per image (enable_per_image_prompt) changes the row action: Optimize with AI in the Images table opens a Custom Prompt dialog before the request goes out. What you type there is used instead of the site-wide addon for that one image — useful when an image is the odd one out, such as a guest post or a co-branded asset.
Per-image replaces site-wide, it does not stack
While the box is checked, the site-wide addon is skipped on every run — including single-field runs started from the alt text, title or filename modals, which do not open the dialog and therefore carry no addon at all. Closing the dialog with the X, Esc or a click outside cancels the run; nothing is sent. The text is not stored, so it applies to that one optimization.
Next steps
Optimization Settings
Pick provider, model, batch size and request timeout.
Single Image Optimization
How a single-image run uses your prompt addon and per-image prompt.
SEO Scoring System
How the plugin scores AI output — and how to weight what matters most for your site.