Alt text should be set for each image you upload that is intended to be used on the web. It is good for both SEO and accessibility, allowing screen readers to describe the image in question. With that in mind, alt text should visually describe the image in a simple and succinct manner, without any flourish that might confuse visually impaired users such as URL's or call-to-actions like "Click here."

A bad example:

Click here to find out more about mountaineering

A good example:
A person reaching a mountain summit at sunrise

Tip: Alt text can also be set when viewing an image from your Files & media library.

Think of crop as a window. When you change the crop, you don't delete the rest of the image, you just choose a part of it to be visible. We provide some common aspect ratios to get you started. For example, "Square" is useful for profile images or for social media posts. If however, you have a specific ratio you need an image to be, choose "Custom" and enter your values.

Tip: Crop doesn't use pixel values. In fact, it doesn't use any value. It's just a ratio. If you want to specify the physical dimension of an image, see Dimensions below.

When cropping an image, focus helps you choose which area is visible.

Use crop direction to position the image crop to your preference. For example, choosing "Centre" will always keep the centre of the image visible, and hide the surrounding areas. "Top-left" will always keep the top-left of the image visible, and so on.

Zoom

Use zoom to focus into a specific area, based on the crop direction that has been set. The maximum zoom is 400%.

Here you can provide precise dimensions in pixels, for example, if you have strict rules around images being no wider than 2,000px. In our editor, we always honour the aspect ratio specified in Crop. This is to prevent authors from accidentally stretching images by providing both width and height values.

Entering a larger value than the original image will result in the image being distorted. It is recommended that you only specify dimensions that are smaller than the original image.

Tip: If using a square crop, entering a value for width or height will achieve the same result.

Enable "auto-compress" to reduce the file size of your image using best-effort techniques to maintain visual quality. Leave disabled if the results aren't as expected.

We apply some compression to images in our content editor in order to improve performance in our app. This compression is not applied at the destination (unless enabled in Quality), so the image you upload to GatherContent is the image you get out, taking into consideration any cropping and dimensions that have been applied.

Note: Images and files uploaded before 15th March 2021 won't have their respective metadata available, including dimensions. Setting custom dimensions is still possible, but default values won't be visible.