Images Inspector: for site images audits

A unique tool to SEO audit all your website images, Images Inspector will assist you analyzing your IMG tags and destination images.

Images Inspector summary page (click to enlarge)

Image auditing will take a small fraction of what you might be used to, for a much deeper inspection.

The list of all IMG tags

This table is the core of the tool: not only it provides the full list of all IMG tags in your site, it also details the size (KB) and dimensions (pixels) of the pointed images. A handy image viewer at the right will give you immediate understanding of the image.

Images Inspector main table, several columns are hidden (click to enlarge)

Like all grids in Visual SEO Studio, the table is exportable to Excel/CSV, its columns can be shown/hidden, all via the usual right-click context menu you obtain by clicking on the top-left gear icon. Nevertheless, we wanted to make it clearer, and thus added helper buttons in the toolbar as well.

API integration

The main grid can be integrated with data columns fetched from third party APIs (e.g. Google Search Console, Bing, Moz...).

Image previews

The right-hand pane "Content" can be switched to display the HTML of the hosting page, or to display the actual images pointed by the IMG tag. You can find the switch in the toolbar above the main grid.
The "Content" pane can also display Data URI images (i.e. images embedded within the HTML code).

Notes:
In order to detail size and dimension of the images, these must have been explored by selecting the "Crawl images" crawl option (selected by default).
In order to be able displaying the image itself, the crawl option "Save images" (not selected by default) should have been selected.

The new crawl options for images

The "Save images" option is by default not selected to save disk space for large crawl session; nevertheless we recommend selecting it to enjoy a more complete auditing experience.
When the option is not selected (and the "Crawl images" option is), images are downloaded and inspected for size and dimensions, and then discarded; thus, no visualization of the images would be possible.

Filtering options

With Images Inspector filters it's easy to pinpoint all most common image related SEO issues.

IMG tags list, filtering options

Available filters are:

• All IMG tags
  Default option, shows all entries in the grid.
• IMG tags missing the ALT attribute
  Getting all images missing the ALT attribute only takes a click!
• IMG tags with SRC attribute pointing to non-'200 OK' image
  Missing images due to wrong URLs or missing files have never been easier to locate. And how about redirects, which normally go unnoticed, or mixed content issues after a HTTP to HTTPS site migration because image addresses were hard coded? Fixing them will take no time.
• IMG tags missing WIDTH or HEIGHT attribute
  Not providing image dimensions in pixel can imply a rendering performance penalties because the browser has to wait for the image file to download in order to properly size the HTML page. Now you have the proper tool to locate IMG tags missing WIDTH and HEIGHT attributes.
• IMG tags with wrong WIDTH or HEIGHT value
  IMG tags with WIDTH and HEIGHT not matching the actual image dimensions would render badly stretched and often are a performance problem when an unnecessarily heavy image is resized via HTML attributes. Visual SEO Studio solves these issues flawlessly permitting you to find them in no time.
• IMG tags pointing to images hosted on external servers
  There are cases where images hosted on external servers are a good choice, like CDNs. Other times they are not. Ever had a colleague "temporarily" setting an IMG tag pointing to a file located on drop box or similar cloud storage spaces? They get unnoticed at first, but they perform awfully in production because such storage spaces have strong limits on the number of concurrent users and bandwidth. Other times images point to a domain no longer in use, or you might discover someone hot-linked someone else's image. This option will find all these cases for you.

You can decide to quickly fix all located issues straight away, may be by using the "Browse page" context menu option while logged-in in your favorite CMS, or you can decide to export the result set for your team mates. Visual SEO Studio adapts to your preferred workflow.

You can cross check everything

You can cross-check everything directly from within the program - check all the normally hidden columns, and use the "Show in DOM" and "Show in code" right-click context menu options to see with your own eyes how and where the IMG is coded - or externally - by using the "Browse page" and "Browse image" context menu options.

IMG tags list, right-click context menu. Above, a rich toolbar all to discover.

Breakdown graphs and grouping trees

Images Inspector helps you dissecting your images assets by grouping them based on different properties.

Breakdown by status code graph and grouping tree (click to enlarge)

You can observe the following breakdowns:

• pages by image
• IMG tags by domain
• IMG tags by protocol
• IMG tags by status code
• by presence/absence of "alt" attribute (graph only)
• by presence/absence of "title" attribute (graph only)
• ...and more to come

IMG tags within a site can literally be millions, so we put a lot of care to make the inspection experience as smooth as possible. All the grouping trees are loaded on-demand as soon as you click the related tab sheet, and they load asynchronously in order not to freeze the program.

All graph charts can be saved/copied by right-clicking on them.

Complete list of image resources

While the main grid in the second tab sheet lists all IMG tags found, the "Distinct images" tab sheet lists all images resources.
Detailed properties are images size in KB, dimensions in pixels, status code and crawl status.

Note:
"Images Inspector" is available only in the Professional Edition. You can evaluate it for free for 15 days by registering the Trial version.

See also:

• Help page Manual: Images Inspector.
• Blog article: Visual SEO 1.9.8: Images Inspection, where the Images Inspector feature was first introduced.