Does it preserve product metadata (alt text, file naming) for SEO?

Yes, better than the originals usually. The pipeline rewrites the file path to a hash-based name (e.g. a3b9c2.webp) which prevents CDN cache poisoning, but preserves and re-applies the product’s Magento image_label attribute as the alt text on the rendered <img>. EXIF metadata is intentionally stripped (privacy + smaller files); IPTC + XMP can be re-injected via Pillow if you need them for downstream DAM workflows. For SEO image-search ranking, the new filename + matching alt text + smaller WebP file size is a net positive on every audit we’ve run.