I am a hobbyist who is building a website to showcase a wedding photographer's portfolio. On the portfolio site, e.g www.example.com/portfolio, all the individual wedding galleries are listed and linked to. It serves as a hub to reach several (20+) individual image galleries. The website is rather new and does not have many external links pointing to it, so I assume it has rather low domain authority.
The problem I am facing is that google did crawl all pages, but decided to not index most of them. After having done some research, I am quite convinced that thin content and potentially also automatically generated code are at fault.
The many images (between 50 and 500) that are being uploaded for each individual gallery all have the same title and alt tag. E.g. the images are called wedding-[location]-[number].jpg, and the alt text would just be "wedding [location]". Consequently, in the HTML code the same lines are repeated for each image. While I understand that this is less than ideal, I lack the resources to add more descriptive alt tags to each image in the short term.
The goal is to be found on google if someone searches for "wedding [location]" or "wedding photographer [location]". I do not have a strong preference whether people then land on the individual gallery page or on the more general portfolio page.
Would it be feasible to use the portfolio site, e.g www.example.com/portfolio, as the canonical page in all individual gallery sites? That way, I would need google to only index one of my sites. It would also alleviate my worries about thin content on each individual gallery page. I could then also put a reasonable amount of textual content on www.example.com/portfolio by moving text from the individual galleries to the overview site.
