Editing description of photos

By Bob Cavanaugh, 28 December, 2024

Forum

iOS and iPadOS

Hi all,
One thing I have decided to do is use one of the AI apps to describe my photos, then add those descriptions to them, so that when I view them in the photos app, I get the more detailed AI description rather than the one automatically generated on the phone. However, when I do that, the automatically generated description still exists. Is the description you can edit using markup different from the one VoiceOver generates, and is there any way to edit that description? Also, does the markup description act like a caption everyone can see, or is it just available to VO users?

Options

Comments

photo descriptions

If you don't want to also hear the descriptions that VO autogenerates, turn off photo descriptions from the rotor if you have it there, or you can also do it from VO quick settings (2 finger quad tap). This will only affect the photos app. VO will still try to recognize text in the photos if you have that setting on though.

I showed a friend a photo that I had added a description to with mark up and she said there wasn't any extra text. So I think the descriptions you add through mark up are like an alt tag, only visible to screen readers.

Question and possible answer

First, to make sure I'm on the same page as you, how are you doing this?
The only option I can find is to open the photo, and either select the Info button or select Show Details in the rotor. I can then write a description in the Add Caption field.
Is that the method you're using? If so, then I believe your caption is part of the meta data for the picture, so likely is shared, along with items like time and location. The other person would have to intentionally look for it though.
Very happy to be corrected though!
Dave

I think OP is using the same…

I think OP is using the same method I do.

From what I can tell, image captions and image descriptions are two different things, though they both get shared when you send a photo.

To add a description via mark up:

Select a photo in the photos app.
Tap info and then tap edit (these are usually near the bottom of the screen.
Tap the add button
This brings up a context menu. Tap image description.
Tap the edit field and paste your AI description here. You can then edit the text to take out anything extra verbose so your description is nice and concise.
When you're finished, tap done twice.

This reminds me that I still have a lot of photos to add descriptions to. It can be a time sink.

Thanks Brian

Thanks for the tip about turning off photo descriptions. I'll keep them on for now, but will probably turn them off once I get all photos tagged. Perhaps using Apple Intelligence is going to be my best bet here as well, since I have also trained my phone to recognize me.