Where you type a caption decides how far it travels. Type it into a page and it stays on that page. Store it with the photo and it comes along every time that photo turns up somewhere new.

For a photographer that isn’t a technical detail. The client, the location, the two hours you waited for the light: none of that reaches the person scrolling past unless you write it down, and nobody wants to write it down twice.

A caption is the shortest way to hand a viewer that story, and WordPress gives you several places to type one that don’t all behave the same way. It isn’t the same thing as alt text either, even though the two get treated as if they were.

The galleries you published years ago can come over without retyping every photo, on every plan including the free one. Which field your old text sits in decides where it lands, and that turns out to be the whole game.

How to Add Captions to WordPress Images in the Block Editor

The quickest route is the one already built into WordPress. Add an Image block to a post or page, select the photo, and a small toolbar appears above it.

Click Add caption and a text box opens underneath the photo, ready for you to type. Once a caption is there, that same button changes to Remove caption, and it means it: clicking it deletes the text rather than tucking it out of sight.

Captions take basic formatting, so a series name in italics or a link to the client’s site both work. Select the words and a small toolbar appears over them with Bold, Italic and Link. Use that one rather than the Link button on the image toolbar above, which links the photo instead of the text. A line or two is plenty, though: a caption is a label, not a paragraph, and a long one competes with the photo for attention.

How to Set WordPress Image Captions in the Media Library

Typing captions one post at a time gets old fast if you reuse photos. The Media Library stores a Title, Caption, Alt Text and Description for every file you upload, and WordPress automatically displays a caption an image already has. Fill it in once there and it pre-fills the moment you insert that photo somewhere.

There’s a scope difference worth knowing. Alt text set in an individual block’s settings applies to that page only, while alt text set in the Media Library becomes the default everywhere the image appears. That documented rule covers alt text rather than captions, though a caption saved in the Media Library does come along when you insert the photo.

You don’t have to leave the editor to change any of it either. Open the media editor and the Details tab lets you edit Alt text, Caption and Description right there. It’s the fastest place to fix a typo when you spot one mid-draft.

One field trips people up constantly. The title attribute sits under Advanced, and it isn’t a caption or alt text. WordPress’s own guidance notes that many devices and browsers don’t display this text at all, so anything you need a visitor to actually read belongs in the caption instead.

How to Add WordPress Gallery Captions With the Gallery Block

The Gallery block gives you captions at two levels. The gallery as a whole can carry one, and then, because every image inside a Gallery block is really its own Image block, each photo can carry a caption of its own too.

Two settings change what a visitor can do with those photos. Enlarge on click switches on WordPress’s built-in lightbox. Link images to attachment pages sends a visitor to a page holding the image along with its caption, description and a comment field, which suits work you want people discussing shot by shot.

Between the two, you can caption a handful of photos in an afternoon without installing a thing. The strain shows up once the archive grows past what you can label by hand, one page at a time.

WordPress Image Captions vs Alt Text vs the Title Attribute

These three get used interchangeably, and they really shouldn’t be. A caption is visible text that every reader sees alongside the photo. Alt text is written for screen readers and search engines, and a visitor who can see the photo never reads it.

That difference matters more than it sounds. Alt text is what carries the accessibility weight, because it’s the text a screen reader announces in place of an image someone can’t see. A beautiful caption sitting under the photo does nothing for that reader if the alt text is empty.

Captions give every visitor context: who, where, which series. Alt text describes the photo to someone who can’t see it. Filling in one is never a substitute for the other, and treating them as the same box is the most common thing we see go wrong on portfolio sites.

How to Add Captions to WordPress Gallery Images That Stay With the Photo

A caption held on the photo itself survives every layout you build after it. A page caption only ever exists on the page you typed it into, which is fine for one blog post and limiting for a portfolio.

Imagely, the WordPress gallery plugin, stores that text with the image inside the gallery rather than on one page. Build the same gallery into a second layout, drop it into an album, open it in a lightbox, and the caption is already there without you retyping a word of it.

How to Add WordPress Gallery Captions to a Single Photo

Open the gallery, find the photo you want to label, and click the three-dot ⋮ menu on it. Choose Edit Details, which is the menu item that opens the text fields rather than the rotate and crop tools.

The panel opens headed Edit Image, and it is where most people go looking for a Caption field. There is no field called Caption. You get Alt Text, a Description and Tags, and the Description is the one that renders as your caption.

So the words you want a visitor to read go in Description. The screen reader text goes in Alt Text, and Tags takes free-form keywords separated by commas. Click Save Changes and that text is stored with the photo from then on.

All three fields are yours on the free plan, and what you type is saved with the photo rather than with the page. The same gallery can go into an album or a second layout later and the words come along.

A visitor sees that description without you paying for anything. On the free plan, clicking a photo opens Imagely’s default lightbox and your description appears along the bottom of the image. So the free version does not stop at storing the text: it shows it.

Letting visitors search that text is a Plus feature. Frontend Search, on Plus and above, adds a search bar to a gallery and can look through image tags, alt text and descriptions, so somebody can find the one shot they came for instead of scrolling through four hundred.

How to Add a Description to a Whole WordPress Gallery

There is also caption-style text that belongs to the gallery rather than to any one photo. Step 3 of the gallery setup flow, the one labelled Settings, holds a Gallery Title and a Gallery Description. The Extended Album layout shows one gallery per row with those descriptions on display, and that layout is free as well.

It describes the gallery, not the individual photo. “Ravello, spring 2026” works beautifully at that level, and it is no substitute for captioning each photo.

How to Add Captions to WordPress Galleries You Already Published

If you have years of posts with galleries buried in them, retyping every caption isn’t going to happen. Convert Galleries exists for this exact job, and it’s included on every plan including the free one.

It converts the WordPress Gallery block and classic shortcodes, and only those. Third-party gallery plugins aren’t touched. For the galleries it does handle, alt text and image descriptions carry across, and your original is backed up before anything changes.

One detail is worth five minutes before you convert a decade of galleries. Your Media Library caption does not become the Imagely caption. The conversion fills Imagely’s Description from WordPress’s Description field, and it reaches for your caption to fill in alt text, ahead of the alt text sitting in your Media Library. So if you want your old captions to show up as captions, copy them into the Description field in the Media Library first, then convert.

You’ll find it under Imagely > Settings > Convert Galleries, and it runs in bulk across all your Posts and Pages at once. The text you had stops being stranded on one page and starts living on the photos instead.

How to Display WordPress Gallery Captions on Your Site

The free lightbox caption covers the basics. What Plus changes is where and when the caption appears, which matters more than it sounds for a portfolio: a visitor has to click before they see anything at all.

Hover Captions for WordPress Gallery Images

Hover Captions come in on Plus and above. A visitor moves their cursor over a thumbnail and an overlay fades in with a title line and a description line underneath, with social sharing icons if you want them.

It’s the closest thing on a website to the way photographers label prints at a show. The image stays clean until somebody shows interest, and then the story appears.

WordPress Gallery Captions in the Lightbox

The other place captions earn their keep is full screen, shown the moment the photo opens instead of waiting for the visitor to look for them. Head to Imagely > Settings > Lightbox Effects, open Lightbox Configuration, and set Lightbox Library to Pro Lightbox, which is a Plus feature. Switch the library over first, because the caption setting below only does anything once Pro Lightbox is the one running.

Then turn on Display captions initially. The caption bar is then open the moment the photo does, carrying a title line above the description, so a visitor reads the caption the second the photo opens rather than hunting for a button. Leave it off and that text sits tucked below the frame behind a chevron.

If your lightbox isn’t set up yet, our guide on how to add a lightbox to WordPress covers the rest of the configuration. Captions and the lightbox are worth setting up in one sitting, because that’s where most visitors will read them.

What to Write in a WordPress Image Caption

The fields are the easy part. Knowing what to put in them is where most portfolios stall, usually somewhere around photo six.

The display hands you a shape to work with. Hover Captions renders a title line and a description line, which happens to be exactly how photographers already label work: a short name, then the specific detail.

Imagely’s own example reads “India / Taj Mahal and its reflection in pool”. Place first, subject second. Swap in whatever your practice already uses, whether that’s the series name and the location or the client and the shoot date.

For a wedding archive that might be “Ravello / first look on the terrace”. For a commercial set, the client and the product. The pattern matters more than the wording: label first, detail second, consistent across the gallery so the captions read as a set instead of a scatter of notes.

One habit is worth building while you’re in there. The alt text is worth writing in the same sitting as the caption, because you’re already looking at the photo and describing it in your head. Coming back to do it later almost never happens.

How to Caption a Large WordPress Photo Archive

Two things are worth knowing before you start, rather than discovering them at photo 400.

Captions and alt text are written one photo at a time. In Imagely, tags are the only field you can apply across a whole selection at once, so that is the straight answer to the question everyone with a large archive asks.

That changes how we’d plan the work. The galleries that win you clients are worth captioning first: the portfolio sets, the pages you link from your homepage, the collections you send to prospects. Working front to back through a decade of uploads is how people quit in week two.

The second thing is metadata. If your files already carry metadata from your Lightroom workflow, Imagely’s documentation says that information should import on its own, and there’s a Bulk Actions > Import Metadata option to run when it doesn’t. A few spot-checks are worth the minute they take before you assume the whole upload came through clean.

Neither is a reason to skip captions. They’re a reason to caption deliberately, in the order that pays you back soonest.

FAQs About WordPress Image Captions

Captions are the small detail that turns a grid of photographs into a body of work someone can follow. Type them where they’ll stay with the photo, fill in the alt text while you’re already there, and your portfolio starts explaining itself. Be sure to check out our post on how to create a stunning WordPress image gallery.

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