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Is there a limit to images file names?
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Hi,
I have an eCommerce site with hundreds of product images.
For management reasons files are named in length to have the product details in them.
Is there a limit for a filename length before it is considered ambiguous or spammy etc.?
(it usually ranges 50-70 chars).Thanks
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I agree with Sean - I've never heard of an official limit to image filenames in terms of length alone. Since the file name is almost always part of the image URL, you could be running the risk of too-long URLs but that's a relatively minor problem. I would make extra sure that your file names don't appear keyword-stuffed, though - so watch out for things like repeating keywords or having all variations of a keyword. There's a big difference between widgets-extralarge-round-blue-widgetmaker.jpg and blue-widgets-best-blue-widgets-blue-widgets-online-free-shipping, if that makes sense. Other than that you should be fine.
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I've never encountered an official limit to image filenames, and I'm not sure there is any SEO impact (other than just the engines ignoring alot of the filename in their crawl). Putting the product description in the filename seems VERY unnecessary and I would try to get some rationale around that. But for the web usage overall, I've never encountered a filename that is too long. 50-70 characters is alot but not prohibitively.
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Thanks.
The only other way I see to maintain order and shorten the filename is to place them within folders:
domain.com/images/products/category-name/product-title.jpg
VS
domain.com/images/products/product-title-product-category.jpg
But then I can have several exact same file-names (that are placed on different categories)
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Hi, 50-70 characters does seem quite spammy to me, but then if you watch the Image SEO Basics Whiteboard Friday by Aaron Wheeler, he says that image filename length has much the same character length as Alt Text, so on that basis the answer would be no.
It would be interesting to hear others feedback on this.
Peter
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