Create image alt text automatically when files hit Google Drive

Watches a Drive folder and writes short, accurate alt text for every image that lands there.

How the work actually flows

A straight line. A person is alerted when a step fails.

Pattern: Sequence (1)

flowchart TD trig>"new image added to folder"]:::trig s0["check file is an image"]:::task s1["ai writes image description"]:::svc s2[("save alt text file to results folder")]:::store trig --> s0 s0 --> s1 s1 --> s2 out[/"ready to use alt text file"/]:::out pay{{"consistent accessibility without manual effort"}}:::pay s2 --> out out --> pay esc(("Alerts a person")):::human s1 -. "if it fails" .-> esc esc -.-> out classDef task fill:#e7f6fe,stroke:#34b8f0,color:#2c2a29 classDef svc fill:#f6f8fa,stroke:#7c8795,color:#2c2a29 classDef mi fill:#e7f6fe,stroke:#0079a8,color:#2c2a29,stroke-width:2px classDef human fill:#fff,stroke:#0079a8,color:#0079a8 classDef store fill:#f6f8fa,stroke:#0079a8,color:#2c2a29 classDef trig fill:#00a4eb,stroke:#0079a8,color:#fff,font-weight:bold classDef trigtime fill:#00a4eb,stroke:#0079a8,color:#fff,font-weight:bold classDef trigdata fill:#8ad4f5,stroke:#0079a8,color:#06314c,font-weight:bold classDef gate fill:#fff,stroke:#e8a23d,color:#6b4708,font-weight:bold classDef out fill:#1f9d6b,stroke:#167a53,color:#fff,font-weight:bold classDef pay fill:#06314c,stroke:#021f33,color:#fff
Starts itA stepAn outside serviceA personA record or sheetResultPayoff
Build size
Standard

A mid-size build with several tools working together.

Business functions
Knowledge Base & RAGFile & Cloud Storage
Connects
Google DriveGoogle Gemini

The problem it solves

You upload images constantly but writing accessible alt text for each one gets skipped when you're busy. That hurts accessibility and can hurt search visibility, and cleaning it up later is tedious.

Who it fits

Content and marketing teams who publish a lot of images online.

How it works

  1. A new image is added to a Google Drive folder
  2. The system checks that the file is actually an image
  3. AI analyzes the image and writes a short, plain description
  4. The alt text is saved as a text file in a results folder
  5. You get an email if anything goes wrong
What you get

Images that meet accessibility standards automatically

Every new image dropped into your Drive folder gets a short, accurate description written and saved alongside it.

What you get

A text file with ready-to-use alt text for every uploaded image.

What you need

A Google Workspace account, a Google AI Studio API key, and an email account for alerts.

We can build this. But should you?

The hard question is not how to build it. It is whether this is the right thing to build first.

That is what a Fractional Chief AI Officer figures out with you, before anyone writes a line of code.

Let's Talk Strategy

Related automations

Build a chatbot that answers questions from your own files

Upload your company documents to Google Drive and chat with an AI that already knows what's in them.

Advanced

Automatically summarize meeting recordings into Notion with scores

Turns your meeting recordings into a scored summary in Notion and pings your team on Slack automatically.

Advanced

Turn incoming PDFs into structured data emailed to you

New PDFs are read by AI, key details are pulled out, and you get an email with the data and the original file.

Advanced

Turn your Google Drive documents into a searchable AI knowledge base

This automation pulls documents from Google Drive and indexes them so an AI assistant can search and answer from them.

Standard
Back to the AI Playbook