Differences with Be My Eyes Descriptions Versus Photos App Captions.

You don't want to use photo captions for this. A few years ago, Apple added a way to add your own descriptions to photos. Of course a good human-written description is preferrable, but AI works wonderful for this.

Photo Description Workflow

1. Open the Photos app.
2. Find the photo you want to share and double tap it.
3. Double tap the share button in the bottom left corner.
4. Share the photo to the AI app you use to generate a description (I use Be My AI for this). This option will probably be near the very bottom of the options in the share sheet.
5. Once the AI generates a description, set your VoiceOver rotor to actions, flick down, and double tap "copy". This will put the description on your clipboard.

Now it's time to add the description to the photo itself.

1. Close the description chat with the AI app and go back to the photos app and select the photo again.
2. Instead of tapping the share button, tap edit in the bottom toolbar on your screen. I find it faster to explore by touch to find it.
3. Tap Mark Up near the top right of your screen. Again, easy to find exploring by touch.
4. Tap add in the bottom right corner. I think visually this is a + sign.
5. This will bring up a pop up menu. Select image description here.
6. This will put you in a text field in edit mode. Set your VoiceOver rotor to edit, flick up or down until you find "paste", and double tap. This will paste in the description that AI generated.
7. You can now edit it to your heart's content. I like to take out the unnecessary wordiness, and replace or add to the descriptions of people with their names if I know them.
8. Tap the done button in the top right a few times. You now have an alt tagged photo you can share. The description is only seen by screen readers, just like alt tags on a website.

Hope this makes sense.

I just wanted to say that I concur with what @Brian Giles says above, all accept the part about ALT tags. Those are actually.. not.. screen reader exclusive.
For the purposes of this thread, however, the image descriptions should only be seen by VoiceOver. 😇

What you can also do is share the image to PiccyBot, get the description and then share, save image. It will add the full description automatically.

@Brian I didn't know that. I thought the whole point of alt tags was that it's a way in HTML to make images accessible through text read by your screen reader. Do they actually show up as text under the image like a caption?

Til, as the kids say. lol

In a sense. Typically from a visual point of view, the Alt tag would show up right at the mouse pointer, I want to say maybe below and slightly leading towards the right as you mouse over an image, link, etc. Caption panel is a good name for it, but yes it's basically a little tooltip that displays as an overlay with the information inside of it. Such as information on a hyperlink, details about an image, etc. They do, of course, also benefit screen reader users as well for obvious reasons. 😊

Not to get too off-topic here, but.. aria-label tags.. are the HTML tags that only show up for screen reader users.

HTH. 🙂

@By Martijn - Sparkling Apps on Thursday, July 9, 2026 - 09:22 - what a great feature that I didn't know about! It is nice to see how you are constantly engaging with the community and adding new features.

Keep up the good work!

--Pete
www.EyesOnSuccess.net