Can I use same images in multilangual website?

Question

I have one site with two languages: English and German for example.

The site contains hreflang tags:

alternate hreflang="en" for example.com AND 

alternate hreflang="de" for example.com/de

What would be the proper convention to name image files? Images are photos and no need to translate (I translated only Alt tags). But Google Image crawler index only main language images and won`t index german. Only new images that I upload are indexed in both languages, and old images that were indexed before the German language was translated are not indexed.

SEO question: From my point of view it would be stupid to duplicate image img src and file names for different languages. It would be waste of resources IMO, unnecessary job to do and does not change anything for the user.

What do you think about this one, is here solution?

I translated page to German (texts, image alts, meta tags, etc.), but use same image file names (img src same).

Answer 1

Uni uni, google uses alt texts for indexing images and computer vision algoritms, file names will not affect google indexs.

In your case, I would check site:{your_site} and image alt,if they are truly not being indexed.