I have a Wordpress photography website that's using a plugin called Nextgen, I recently decided to try to dig into how SEO works for images. In looking at the coding for just one of my photos on my website, I'm rather confused as to what a search engine might choose as the image description. The plugin I'm using only gives me an option for an image "title" and "description". From that, the following code is then created for each image (I've removed some code to shorten what I'm pasting):
<div class="nextgen_pro_thumbnail_grid pro-thumbnail-border-template" id="displayed_gallery_0e5ffe8d21d5156a66df4a0a4c77fd92">
<a href="...image.jpg"
title="Purple Hue of Tatoosh Mountains at Sunset with wildflower meadow, Mt Rainier, Landscape Photography Print"
data-title="Purple Mountains and Wildflower Meadow at Sunset, Mt Rainier"
data-description="Purple Hue of Tatoosh Mountains at Sunset with wildflower meadow, Mt Rainier, Landscape Photography Print"
<picture>
<source srcset='...image.jpg'>
<img title="Purple Mountains and Wildflower Meadow at Sunset, Mt Rainier"
alt="Purple Mountains and Wildflower Meadow at Sunset, Mt Rainier">
</picture>
<noscript>
<img src="...image.jpg"
title="Purple Mountains and Wildflower Meadow at Sunset, Mt Rainier"
alt="Purple Mountains and Wildflower Meadow at Sunset, Mt Rainier"/>
</noscript>
</a>
</div>
As you can see, it's got the image title and description under the first section after "a href". But then under the "picture" and "noscript" sections, it just includes "title" and "alt", which are identical to each other.
My question is: Does anyone know what section of this code a search engine would look at as the primary description and title/alt? And in terms of title and description, does it make sense to have them different, or should they just be the same?
I'm also trying to figure out whether you can have commas or other punctuation in image descriptions. Thanks for any help.
