TinyIMG reverted my hand-written alt text overnight — how to restore it on Shopify
TinyIMG's alt-text optimizer fills your image alt text from a template, and when that setting is left on, a background optimization run can re-apply the template across every image at once — usually overnight, since the sync runs on its own schedule — replacing the alt text you wrote by hand. Shopify keeps no version history for alt text, and most full-store backups skip it entirely, so there's no native undo and no record of what your alt text said before.
Step by step
Turn off TinyIMG's automatic alt text before you fix anything. Open its Image Alt Text / alt-text optimizer and disable the template, then pause any scheduled optimization — a bulk/auto alt-text feature re-applies its template on the next sync and will overwrite your fix again, with no undo. Check whether it touched collection images too, not just products.
Recover your originals from any export that captured alt text: re-import the Image Alt Text column from a product CSV taken before the sync (Matrixify maps it back to each image). Shopify's own product export doesn't include alt text, so this only works if you exported with a tool that did.
Where nothing survives, alt text has to be retyped by hand — there's no native rollback for it. Do your highest-traffic pages first: check Search Console > Pages for the products and collections actually earning clicks, and write specific, descriptive alt text for those rather than re-using a template.
Going forward, keep a daily snapshot of alt text alongside your other SEO fields. A snapshot taken before the sync still holds the correct alt text, so an overnight run is flagged the next morning — with the app that changed it named — and yesterday's alt text restores in one click instead of a manual rebuild.
Source: TinyIMG app listing (alt-text optimizer / Image Alt Text feature); Shopify Help Center: adding alt text to product images
SEO Vault keeps a daily snapshot of every SEO field on your store — meta titles, descriptions, alt-text, tags, handles (products AND collections) — and emails you the moment something changes in bulk, with the likely app responsible. One click restores yesterday's state, just the SEO fields. Free to monitor and get alerted; $14/mo for 1-click restore.