What in particular about the rewritten filename would be detrimental to image search traffic?
The filter retains the original filename as well as the alt text.
The filter retains the original filename as well as the alt text.
From the horse's mouth: "optimizing your image filenames and alt text makes it easier for image search projects like Google Image Search to better understand your images."
http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrust...
Anything that makes it harder for Google to understand your site is a losing business proposition.
I'd rather use PageSpeed for Firefox (optimize in dev, set the appropriate filenames, then deploy to production) to avoid any possible ranking penalties caused by this filter in production.