One Method to Add Photo Captions Visually Below Your Digital Photos

This is a cool way to add captions to your scanned photos without having to rely on embedded metadata. In other words, this way would allow you to have the written caption as a part of the JPEG or TIFF file itself. The main advantage to this idea is not losing your captions over the years (possibly even centuries) should an application “accidentally” delete or write over the metadata contents.

Programs change, data conversion can get lost — this way your caption is part of the photo itself and thus your written information for your photos shouldn’t be lost (the only way this could happen would be to crop it off from the photo). So years from now, people will know who or what is in your photo, and/or any other tidbit you might want to include.

The first thing to do is create a template in Adobe Photoshop for Mac or PC (or an image editor of your choice with fairly comparable features).

Since 99 percent of these scans would be fairly small in size, I made the template only 8 inches wide by 6 inches high. Anything larger would simply need a custom made, larger template.

I scan 4″ by 6″ photos at 1200 dpi — which is why this template is created at 1200 dpi as well. That way, if a person enlarges this photo to something like 8 by 12 inches, it’s dpi will be somewhere around 600. This is twice as high as what most people feel necessary.

Most experts would scan a standard 4″ by 6″ photo around 600 dpi. And in scanning photos at 1200 dpi, it might be overkill and take longer to scan as well as gobble up tons of megabytes! But that’s just me! I want to be able to zoom into these photos without loosing any details. So it’s up to you. What most people recommend is to scan photos at 600 dpi thus you can create this template at 600 dpi as well.

Also, I choose to use 16-bit RGB color rather than 8-bit. Is that really necessary? Probably not. Will it take longer to process, and gobble up more megabytes? Totally! But is it superior for editing photos? (Such as enhancing color etc.) It sure is.

So really, it’s all up to you. You could use 600 dpi at 8-bit, or go nuts like me and choose 1200 dpi at 16-bits. In a nutshell, my way is totally higher in quality, but it will be harder on your computer, slower to scan, and it will take more memory and storage.

Later, after loading the photo onto this template, I would type over the word “what” with the actual subject of what the photo is. Then I would move on to the other word “where” and type over that with the actual location. These details are better displayed later on these instructions.

After I have scanned a few pictures and have them sitting in a folder somewhere on my computer, I then move them into this template. So, all I do for that is to open the photo in Photoshop, then I “select all” by pressing Command and the letter A for “all.” That’s how it is on the Mac (Windows users it would be Control and the letter A). Then I hit Command-C to “copy” it to the computer’s (invisible) clipboard.

Then I close that photo and (with the template already open) paste the image onto the template by pressing command and the letter V. (Control-V for Windows users)

Since I like to create a frame around the photo, I like to have it centered out perfectly. So my first thing to do is to display the grid lines on the Photoshop template. To do this I simply go to “view” then “show” and select “Grid” (Or simply select “Command” and the ‘ key). Doing that again will turn the grids back off too.

Now that the grid is selected you can drag the picture to where ever you want. I like to slide it to the corner of the first grid lines (both vertical and lateral).

Now is when I’ll start typing over the words of the template text. But before I do, I’ll slide the text under the picture and try to center things out the best I can. So when I do type, I keep an eye on the photo and when I should start the next line. If at all possible, I try to start new lines for the different descriptive factors (ex: What, and where is on line one along with the band name, the actual people’s names are on line two, and the details are on lines three and four).

In this example, I typed over the word “what” with “Concert at Kennedy’s Bar.” Then I typed over “Where” with “St. Louis, MO.” I continued on this way even adding any special notes and interesting facts about this photo.

* I use this text template in order to remain consistent. Of course you don’t have to use it, you could simply start typing away with your own narration. I just like doing it this way to keep me as consistent as possible.

Also notice, I did not center this picture in the middle of the template. That would be wasting space. So after moving everything to the upper left corner, then I move on to the next step: cropping off the dead space.

Now it’s time to crop off the dead space. I simply select the cropping tool and use the grid to get a good approximate frame around the whole picture. Once I do, I hit “enter” to complete the crop.

And here is what I am left with!

At this point it’s a good idea to see if everything looks good to you. Make sure everything is spelled correctly, and reads nicely. Also make sure the text is centered out under the picture nicely. Then turn the grid lines back off.

Then I’ll flatten the image (I figured, to save space who really needs a layered file if the only thing I did with the photo was create a small caption. I figure if I ever needed to change the caption, I would simply color out the old caption and add the new text on a new layer. Then I would flatten it again).

To flatten this image, I went up to “layer” on the menu bar and then selected “Flatten image.”

Then I simply save it as (whatever name, or naming system I want), but I save it with the TIFF file format (File > “Save As”).

I feel if I am going to go through the trouble of doing all this, and using such high quality settings, I am certainly going to save it as a high quality format that doesn’t degrade if I were to edit it in the future. But then the question is, what about loading it to the Internet. And that’s why after saving this as a TIFF, then I hit “Save As” again, and save it as a JPEG file.

You can be the judge of how high of a JPEG quality setting you want. But I will suggest save it as: High quality (at least 10) and select “baseline optimized.” This might be too large to upload onto some sites, if so, maybe save it as a lower quality file (maybe 3 or 4). But I would still use the baseline optimized selection.

Basically it comes down to having a master file (TIFF) and possibly a few different sized copies to send to your friends or upload to some site on the internet (JPEG).

And that’s it! That’s your first photo saved with a visual caption written out below it.

Reusing This Master Template For Your Entire Photo Collection

Now you can open the template again (which should be blank if you saved the previous picture “save as” which would leave the template unaltered). This time I will show you another size picture and how the same process will work for this too.

Click on (File > “Save As”) from top menu item.

With this template, you can copy almost any shap of picture. You could choose to add captions at the bottom of the photo, or if it’s a skinny picture (like a school portrait) you can put the text to the side of the photo. Whatever you like!

Here is an example of how different photos fit into the template. The key is to remember to save the template “as” something else and not just hit save by itself. The worse case scenario is you may have to make a new template if you screw up and only hit save instead of save as.

I hope this idea was a help to you, and people for generations will have at least some information about your photo no matter where it winds up on the internet or elsewhere.

If you have any questions about how I did any of the steps above, just ask away in the comments below.

Have fun!