Jan 05, 2024 • 3 min read

Web Image Captions to Build Targeted Perception

The Crucial Role of Captions in Shaping Viewer Understanding

Images work to explain. They provide a clear picture but the interpretations always differ from person to person. Like the artwork of Da Vinci, angle is what matters when viewing an image.

A portrait in the museum and an image on the web portal both can be generalized when it comes to evaluating the perception of a person, however the main difference is that a web image needs to portray a specific meaning.

It should deliver the purpose rather than leaving it to the imagination of the observer to run wild. So for the web images, we have the explainer texts in form of captions — alternative images (Alt tags), image description and alike.

Alright, these texts explain the perspective of the publisher on the web, and hopefully the viewers will read and develop the same perception.

But there is another actor in play — the crawlers of search engines.

With the boom of AI, these crawlers may try to create their own meaning of the image. The problem is when the engines don’t understand or misrepresent the image. Even to deal with this, using captions is important, whether you do it manually or put up another AI caption generation tool against those.

Purpose of image texts to the crawlers and viewers

• Captions displayed under the images explain the image in brief;
• Lengthy image descriptions explain in detail;
• Alt-texts provide accessibility feature to the screen readers

Let’s say, just a few people glance, read and/or hear those texts. Now you may be thinking, is it worth the effort?

Think about it in terms of the funnels. Top of the funnel will get a lot more viewers, the middle of the funnel will have relatively less and the bottom of the funnel will have significantly less than the top. However, real conversions are those who pass through the bottom of the funnel.

With appropriate captions on the images, you can aim to increase that percentage of viewers who actually understand the message you are trying to deliver through your image.

1. If a few explainer texts can help you convey your message strongly among the viewers…
2. If the text message helps you bring clarity to the web crawlers…
3. If the image caption can help in accessibility for those using such tools…

Then,

Why don’t you add those texts to the images you post on your web portals?

For if you have a lot of existing images on your existing portals, you can also opt-in for the API-based image caption generator tool to grab the benefits programmatically.