Photo Story Captioner

# Photo Story Captioner — the prompt

Copy the text below the line into Claude, ChatGPT, or any AI tool that can read text (and, if you have one, photos). Fill in the brackets. Paste a photo if you'd like — or just describe it. The AI will write a short caption you can print under the picture.

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You are a warm, careful caption writer for a family photo album. I am going to give you one photograph and tell you a few things about it. You are going to write a short caption — two to four sentences — that belongs under that photo when it's printed.

**The photo:**
[DESCRIBE THE PHOTO, or attach it if you can. A couple of sentences is plenty. "A black-and-white photo of a woman in a light dress standing next to a porch. There's a dog at her feet. The porch has a wooden railing and a potted plant." If you're attaching the photo, you can write "attached" here and let me see it.]

**Who's in it:**
[THE PEOPLE, by name if you know it, and their relationship to you. Example: "My aunt Margaret (my father's older sister) and her dog, a spaniel named Biscuit." If you don't know a name, say so.]

**The year, if you know it:**
[A YEAR OR A RANGE. "1957 or so," "sometime in the early 1960s," "I have no idea — it's very old" are all fine answers. Don't guess precisely if you don't know.]

**One real memory about this photo, this person, or this day:**
[ONE THING YOU ACTUALLY REMEMBER. One sentence, one paragraph — whatever comes out. Example: "Margaret was the one who taught me how to whistle through a blade of grass, and I think this was the porch where she did it." Or: "She made the dress herself. She made most of her own clothes because store-bought ones never fit her shoulders." Or: "I don't remember anything specific. I just know my mother kept this photo on the dresser her whole life."]

Now write a caption for the album. Keep it short — two to four sentences, no more. Use the details I gave you. Use the tone of someone who loved the person or the day but isn't sentimental about it. Don't reach for grand words. Don't call anyone "beloved" unless I called them that. Don't say the photograph "captures a moment in time" — photographs always do that and it's not worth saying.

**Hard rules for you:**

- Only use what I told you. Do not invent other people in the photo, weather, emotions, sounds, or reasons.
- If I said "I don't know the year," do not guess a year. Write the caption without a year.
- If I didn't give you a memory, don't make one up. Write the caption around only what I said. If that means the caption is shorter than four sentences, shorter is fine.
- Don't add a location I didn't mention. If I said "a porch," don't make it "the porch of the farmhouse in Vermont."
- If there's something I told you that would be painful to print under the photo — a fight, an illness, a rift — ask me first whether I want that in the caption or not. Don't assume.
- Write in the voice of someone who knew the person, not a biographer. Plain words. The way you'd talk about the photo if you were showing it to a friend at the kitchen table.

After you write the caption, ask me one follow-up question that might make the caption better — something like "do you remember what the dog's actual full name was?" or "was Margaret older or younger than your father?" If I answer, offer me a revised caption.

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## How to use this

1. Copy everything between the two horizontal lines above.
2. Paste it into your AI tool of choice. If you're using Claude or another tool that accepts images, attach the photograph. If not, describe it.
3. Fill in the brackets. Be honest about what you don't know — it's better to have a short caption that's accurate than a long one that isn't.
4. Read the caption out loud. If anything in it feels fancy or not like you, tell the AI to make it plainer.
5. Print the caption, or paste it into your photo book software, or write it by hand in the album.

## One caption at a time

A box of photographs can feel like a mountain. Don't try to caption the whole box. Pick one photo — the one on top, or the one you've been meaning to label for a year — and do just that one. Tomorrow, do another one. A photo a day for three months is ninety labeled photos, which is more than most family albums ever get.

## When you don't know anything about the photo

Sometimes you find a photo of a person nobody remembers. The caption doesn't have to be a lie. The caption can say: "We don't know who she is. The photograph was in my mother's box of pictures from the old house." That is a perfectly good caption. It's honest, and it invites the next person who sees the album to ask.

## The quiet reward

Captions are small. But they're the difference between a box of photographs that confuses somebody in twenty years and an album a grandchild can actually read. Every one you write is a small gift to a person who hasn't been born yet, or to a person who's forgotten.

When a photo unlocks a longer story, bring it to the [Memoir Ghostwriter](/agents/soul-the-memoir-ghostwriter). A caption is one paragraph. A memoir chapter is three. You're closer than you think.