Caption Field
The IPTC field carrying a written description of what the image shows.
Measured in
characters
In depth
News captions follow a strict convention: who, what, where and when, in the present tense, followed by a credit. Beyond editorial use, a caption is the only part of an image that survives translation into text — it is what search engines index and what an alt attribute is built from.
Examples in practice
A caption reading who is pictured, where and on what date allows a picture desk to publish without contacting the photographer.