My photos all have names like 020b253ff7eb.webp and I can't find anything
The problem
Your site moved, and every picture came with it — several hundred, sometimes
several thousand of them, named things like 020b253ff7eb.webp. They're all
there. None of them are findable. Searching does nothing, because there's
nothing written about any of them to search.
Nobody is going to sit and caption three thousand photos by hand. That's exactly why this exists.
What Bernard does
First, he brings every picture into your library. That's a record card per photo — its fingerprint, its size, where it's used on your site. Nothing on your site changes; this is filing, not editing. It's safe to run twice: anything you've already labelled keeps your wording.
Then, if you'd like, he looks at each one. Not at the file name — at the actual picture — and writes a title, a description, alt text, and a few search words. He fills blanks only. He never touches your rights or your approvals, and he never overwrites something you wrote.
He works in batches under a budget, so a large library takes a few goes. Ask again and he continues where he stopped.
What it costs
One shell per go. Bringing photos in is the free part; the looking-and-writing is what's budgeted, and each go is capped — so a big library is several goes, and you only spend on the ones actually being done.
What you get
Your pictures become searchable by what's in them. You can ask for one by describing it. Your shop photos start carrying their own descriptions to Google. And the picture chooser stops being a wall of identical thumbnails with meaningless names underneath.
The prompt
“Bring my photos into the library and tidy them up — then tell me how many still have no title or tags.”
The [bracketed] parts are yours to fill in. First time? Connect bernard to your AI over MCP — a one-time setup in bernard → your site → Use your own AI — then paste the prompt above.
Questions people ask
- Why are my photos named like that?
- Because the site that made them named them that way. Website builders rename uploads to a content fingerprint so two different pictures can never collide, and so a picture can be cached forever. It's sensible engineering and completely useless to a human: the name tells you nothing about what's in the photo. Bringing them into your library is how they get names you'd recognise.
- Does this change anything on my site?
- No. This only creates and improves the *records* of your pictures — the cards that say what each one shows and where it's used. Your pages, your layout and the pictures themselves are untouched. It's the one job in the workshop that can't alter how your site looks.
- What does Bernard actually write for each photo?
- Four things: a short title ("Watercolour portrait, green headdress"), a sentence or two describing it, alt text for anyone using a screen reader, and a handful of words you'd plausibly search by — subject, colour, mood. He only ever fills in blanks. Anything you've written yourself is never overwritten.
- Does he do all of them at once?
- No — he works through them in batches under a budget, so a big library takes a few goes. Just ask again to carry on where he left off. Photos already done are skipped, so asking twice never costs you twice for the same picture.
- Why does it say the rights are unknown?
- Because that's the truth, and a blank pretending to be an answer would be worse. A picture file doesn't say who owns it — most sites strip that information out when they publish. So every photo brought in starts as "rights unknown" until you say otherwise. Tell Bernard the truth as you know it — "these are all mine", "that one's a stock photo", "the photographer shot those" — and he'll record it against each picture.
- Do I have to approve every photo?
- Not the ones already on your live site. You published those yourself, so Bernard treats them as settled and never asks again. Approval is only ever asked for pictures that are genuinely new.
- Is the alt text worth bothering with?
- Yes, twice over. It's what a blind visitor hears in place of the picture, so it's the difference between your site working for them or not. And it's one of the few pieces of text a search engine can read about an image — on a shop, that's every product photo quietly describing itself to Google instead of saying nothing.
- What can I do afterwards that I couldn't before?
- Search your own pictures by what's in them rather than by file name, and ask Bernard for a picture by description — "use the one of the blue glaze bowls" — instead of hunting for a hash. It also means he stops guessing which photo you meant.