Caption Pro is your one-stop application for captioning photos and videos, turning your paper photos into shareable digital files and creating slideshows.
Why apply captions?
You may remember who was in a photo or video and where and when it was taken now, but will you remember it in 10 years time? Mobile devices do their best to record this data automatically. “When” information is usually correct, thanks to automatic time syncing, but the “where” information is seldom precise enough. If you use a dedicated device such as a digital camera or video recorder, location data is seldom recorded at all, and recorded image or video times may be incorrect if the device time is not set. If you want to add “when” and “where “to the image pixels Caption Pro can do this automatically without user intervention as shown below. This is a great option if you want to display large numbers of phone camera images in a digital photo frame.
Defining “who” is in a image or video automatically relies on labelled examples and good lighting. Your recollection of who appears is likely to be much better. Caption Pro embeds the caption into the image or video (and allows you to edit it later) so that the information you add is never lost, however the image or video is displayed.
Why Can’t AI Write My Captions?
AI has made great strides in recent years but when it’s applied to captioning pictures to provide more information or background its limitations become apparent. Below is an image and a caption supplied by a ‘cutting-edge’ web service for image captioning:
The image features a man sitting at a dining table, enjoying a meal. He is holding a fork in his hand and appears to be eating a sandwich. The table is set with various items, including a bowl, a cup, a knife, and a spoon. There are also two cell phones on the table, one closer to the man and the other further away.
In the background, there is a chair and a potted plant, adding to the overall ambiance of the scene. The man seems to be having a pleasant meal in a comfortable setting.
The caption is descriptive, and fluent in the manner of text generated by ChatGPT, but has numerous inaccuracies and adds little to the appreciation of the image. Other image analysis and caption generation services aimed at social media are far less descriptive. They appear to be canned sentences linked to one feature of the image as shown below:
- Just demolished a plate of burgers and fries at my favorite lunch spot! Now I’m ready for a food coma. #foodie #lunchtime 🍔🍟
- Who needs fancy platters when you can have a fast food feast at your local joint? #yum #foodlover 🍔🍟
- Just enjoyed a delicious lunch at my favorite restaurant. The platter was amazing and the service was top-notch. #foodie #lunch
- I can’t believe people still eat fast food. It’s literally killing us with all the chemicals and preservatives. #healthyliving #foodie
Caption Pro’s option to generate a caption using image analysis (via Microsoft Azure’s Cognitive Services) gives
- A man sitting at a table with a plate of food
which is accurate but not very useful.
At present, there appears to be no way of generating captions which reliably add to the appreciation of images using AI, as information not present in the pixels (such as location, date and circumstances) is not used. Poor results are likely if the image is unlike any seen in the training process for the AI.
Extract Multiple Images from Scans or Photos of Multiple Prints
Caption Pro can automatically crop your scan or photo of several paper prints. Place as many photos on your flatbed scanner as you can fit and scan, or photograph them with your mobile or digital camera. Caption Pro will automatically detect individual photos from the input image. Face recognition can label people appearing in the image. Photos will be straightened and can be rotated, flipped, colourised, or tonally adjusted before saving into separate image files, to which two-part, editable captions can be added and you can create a PDF document from multiple image files for easy sharing. Need to know more? Click here to view the manual. Don’t need to add captions? Check out ImageSplit.
Caption Videos
Caption Pro can embed editable captions in your videos which will appear below the original, leaving it as you recorded it, however the video is shown.
Colourise Photos
Caption Pro can add colour to black-and-white images using state-of-the-art AI technology as shown below. Click on ImageSplit and check Colourise for results like these:
Camera Trap Data analysis
Do you need to analyse camera trap data? CamTrap Pro uses AI do identify images containing animals which can theb be tagged manually. Images containing animals can be also identified using a range of algorithms and then tagged. Click here for more details.
Create Digital Facsimiles of Documents
Do you have old diaries or documents you’d like to preserve or share? You can make each image a separate page in a PDF file, or use manual definition of crop regions to create digital facsimiles of documents such as diaries by photographing pages, defining regions containing text, saving these regions as images, and then adding all the images to a single PDF file where each file page contains the text from each original document page.
Face Recognition
Caption Pro’s powerful Premium face recognition can detect faces in a photo and then find and label the same faces in other photos so that anyone looking at the photo will know the names of the people in it .
Caption Photos with ease
Caption Pro can add captions created by typing or speaking to images and videos below the original content, thus keeping all your pixels unchanged. Images with captions in the pixels can be viewed in any application on any platform or in hard copy. Caption Pro also lets you present a selection of captioned images and videos as a slideshow. You have control over the display of each slide, rather than creating a video of all of the content. Captioning photos and videos is fun with Caption Pro. You can view the manual here.
Editing and Sizing Photo Captions
Text captions can be edited after application. If any detail of the caption needs amending, the entire caption does not need to be re-applied. The size of captions is automatically adjusted to fit them into the specified space. No more wondering what font size to use.
Two-Part Photo Captions
Two-part captions give flexibility and captions can be obtained automatically from a number of sources, such as Photo Gallery, Picasa, and Windows Photos. More details here.
Add CaPtions from Existing metadata
You may have already added date, location, or subject metadata to your photos with Picasa, Photo Gallery, Photos, or native Windows. Caption Pro can turn this metadata from many different sources into visible captions automatically, allowing you to easily process multiple photos.
Use Another Image as a Sub-Caption FOR YOUR PHOTO
A sub-caption can be an image or part of one. This is ideal for artwork photographs where the artwork and its description may be a separate image as shown above. The back of an old family photo may be included in the image.
Change Aspect Ratio of PHOTOS
Caption Pro can also adjust the aspect ratio of images so that they can be seen in their entirety even when the platform or hard copy constrains the aspect ratio of the image.
Caption PHOTOS and Videos IN ANY Language
Captioning can be in any language supported by Windows, including Asian languages.
Why Do I need CAPTIONs if my PHOTOS ARE ON SOCIAL MEDIA?
A picture may be worth a thousand words but a few words about a picture can add greatly to its impact. Social media like Facebook and Google Photos recognise this. They all provide captioning and comment facilities for uploaded images. Face recognition can identify people in a photo once you’ve flagged an example. But problems arise if you want to move images out of their social media setting. You can download the picture , but you can seldom download any associated text. Pictures downloaded from Facebook have reduced pixel count, which is seldom a problem if images are to be viewed electronically, but the loss of all the uploaded image metadata (including location and date taken) is more problematic. By using Caption Pro to embed this data in the image, you or anyone viewing the picture will always know when and where the photo was taken and you can change it if required.
Do you really want to write YOUR CAPTION over your Photo?
Phone and tablet vendors recognise the importance of adding text to photos, and all provide some native capability in their products. However, they all write on top of the photos. This may be fine for some images, but not for all of them, particularly scanned family photos. In the pre-digital area, annotations were commonly underneath a photo in an album, or on the back of individual prints. They weren’t written on the photos.
Why Meaningful File and Folder Names Aren’t Enough
If you use a personal computer you may have included information about pictures in file or folder names, or even in metadata. Many institutions advise this as a way of preserving information about a digital picture, but if you move the pictures to a tablet or phone, this information is not easily accessible – all you see are the pixels. Captions added with Caption Pro are visible on any platform – they are part of the image or video.
Interface with Adobe Lightroom Classic
Caption Pro can be added to Lightroom Classic as an external editor. See here for details.
Swiping Through CAPTIONED Image and Video collections
Mobile phones have always had a seamless way of presenting images and videos so that you can step through them by swiping. Now you can do the same thing on a Windows desktop or tablet with Caption Pro. You can add fully controllable captions to each item without writing on top of anything. Caption Pro is a great way to share a selection of your travel or family photos and videos with your friends.
Like to try it out for free? Download here .
Do you need to caption multiple files from a Windows machine you can’t install on?
See here for details of how to access Caption Pro from any of these devices.
Do you need to caption multiple files from a Mac?
See here for details of how to download Caption Pro for Mac.
Do you want to scan paper photos, or caption and share them using an iPhone or iPad?
See here for more details of how to do this free with CaptionEdit
Testimonials
I am a keen photographer, both on holidays and around town. I have found Caption Pro a great tool for keeping precious notes with each photo. For my holiday photos, they make a ready holiday diary. At the same time, being able to select individual captioned photos allows me to easily create a personalised collection to copy or email to family and friends.
I have also used Caption Pro to add captions to family history photos, and value the feature that the caption does not overwrite the photo and that it can be easily edited.
Jane, Australia.
Great program
Felix, Australia
…an absolute gem that I have been looking for for years..
Lee, USA
It’s very simple to use and does the job quite nicely.
All About Digital Photos – Visible Captioning, Canada
Captioning Videos
Apply Simple Captions to Multiple Files
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Setting Multi-Line Captions with Web App