Plugin inspection:

Alt Text AI – Automatically generate image alt text for SEO and accessibility

Use with caution

Last revised:

Confidence: Medium
This plugin has been given a short, targeted code review.

Before using this plugin, you should carefully consider these findings. Read more about this recommendation.

Warnings

This recommendation applies to version 1.10.14 of this plugin, but the most recent version is 1.10.15. These findings may no longer be correct.

Findings

This plugin is coded largely as expected, using the expected functionality, although it does frequently use direct db interactions where using a WP_Query object may have been preferable, and there are some instances where the error reporting of function calls has been suppressed, although this is usually accompanied by appropriate state checks.

There is a very large codebase involved, so there may potentially be issues which have not been identified.

the plugin connects to an external API to provide its functionality, and in the case of being run on a site where the content is not publicly available, it uploads the images to the api directly, which could potentially be an issue depending on the images being uploaded and the retention policy of the external service.

Additionally the plugin unilaterally increases the memory limit set for php, if it judges that it is set too low for the operation of the plugin, and doesn’t reset the setting after the operations have been completed, which could potentially be an issue in some environments.

Reason for the 'Use with caution' result

The plugin has been given this recommendation at the tester's discretion:

This recommendation has been given due to the large codebase involved, and its extensive use of direct SQL queries to access data. The use of ini_set to increase the php memory limit is also something that is potentially problematic

Failure criteria

  • Very large codebase

Read more about our failure criteria.