Question / Discussion - Images and Alt tags for SEO

I would like to hear your thoughts on images file names/titles, Alt tags, captions and Descriptions.
Do you think about your content/context of your website then change the names of your images to relate to the content? How much of a bearing does this have on SEO?

I am going to use a random example Site is tinfoilhats
so you want to upload a header for your website instead of uploading a nice header image called "headerlogo.jpg" what would be a much better name for SEO reasons? something like "TinFoilHatsHeader.jpg"
To me it kind of makes sense, but again i am not nearly as seasoned as some of you, hence why i am creating this post lol.
So if TinFoilHatsheader.jpg is a much better option what would be a good ALT for this? Same goes for Caption and Description for this particular image?

Also if you have a nice About US page, would the image you use Tinfoilhats-aboutus.jpg or (a relative keyword you are targeting) alienProtectionHats-aboutus.jpg?

I am not implying that just doing this is going to smash your Rankings, but i would think just small things like this can really matter in the long run.

I was just getting ready to add some new images to my wordpress and started to think about it.

Thanks all in advance for your input and replies

Hey Blacktech,

You shouldn't change your photo's name & alt on each repetitive images (WH Method) like header's image, etc. . To push SEO semantic, you can change all that stuff on each single content image, it'll work for sure. You'll be able to improve all your posts' semantic with this trick.

You should definitely have relevant image names and alt tags, but the same as the rest of your page content they should build context without being spammy.