For agents
Nothing to do. Descriptions appear on their own.
If you want your own words on a photograph, either caption it in the MLS when you upload the listing, or edit the alt text on the image in WordPress. Either way, what you write is kept permanently.
For web designers and developers
Descriptions live on the image attachment, not in the page template, so they are available anywhere the image is rendered — galleries, lightboxes, cards, search results, structured data, and any custom template you write. Standard WordPress functions return them without special handling.
The provenance of each description is recorded alongside it. That is what allows a listing to be refreshed from the MLS without losing text that came from a better source, and it is why hand-edited alt text is safe from automated passes.
Listing photos are excluded from the alt text scanner in GenieADA settings, which covers uploaded images only — agent headshots, blog images, page content. They are handled by the automatic pipeline instead, so they will not appear in that scan as missing.
Running it on demand
Descriptions are produced in the background, a few listings at a time, so a full library fills in over hours rather than competing with imports for server resources.
To do one listing immediately, open it in WordPress and use Describe Photos in the GenieScout panel. It reports what happened for that listing, alongside site-wide figures for today and since installation.
If it reports nothing to do, every photo on that listing already has a description from a source that outranks a generated one.
What is shown in the report
- Photos described — images that received a description on this run.
- Reused from cache — images already described, costing nothing. High is good.
- Failed — the image could not be read. Usually transient.
- Blocked by rules — a generated description did not pass Fair Housing screening and was discarded. The photo falls back to a plainer description.
Today’s figures are shown separately from the running total, because a large historical count and an active problem look identical in a single number.
