Background of the issue:
We’re managing a large website with approximately 1.5 million images. For performance reasons, we want to avoid having these attachments duplicated in the database for each language. About 99% of our images do not require translated texts.
Symptoms:
- Using the new “Automatically detect best options for translating image texts” setting successfully reduces duplication, but it also causes issues: missing images in the media library on secondary languages, and when enabling a new language, the media library is completely empty for this new language.
- To clarify, when translating posts via the WPML translation editor, this is no problem as the editor will duplicate images in the background when necessary (e.g. for featured images). However, it is a problem when we want to manually create a page or update an options page in a secondary language, as most images will be missing there in the media library.
- When we set the attachment post type to “Use translation if available or fallback to default language”, these issues disappear in our tests. We are able to select images in secondary languages, even though they have not been duplicated by the "Auto detect" feature.
Questions:
Is there any technical or functional reason not to use the “Use translation if available or fallback to default language” setting for attachments? It appears to solve the problem efficiently, yet WPML does not list it as the recommended option and places the option behind a lock.
I recommend updating to WPML 4.8.5 as there were some improvements in media handling (not sure if this issue is addressed though).
Regarding your question, you can use “Translatable – use translation if available or fallback to default language” for the Media (attachment) post type. The main caveat is SEO/texts: if you need localized alt/title/caption you must still provide translations for those texts, you will need to handle those case by case.
thank you for your reply, that sounds good. For most images we do not need translated texts, so this is fine for us.
If we would need to translate one, is there a way to manually duplicate media into the other languages? This would always be useful when using the "Auto detect" feature, regardless of the "Translatable with fallback" option.
If this flow is not OK you'll need the WPML Media add-on, and then you'll be able to translate the meta this way:
- Go to WPML → Media Translation.
- Find the image and click the “+” under the target language.
- In the edit popup, you can (a) keep the same file and just localize alt/title/caption, or (b) upload a different file for that language. Save.
