I discovered some benefits of including a caption to a photo

The Maps app allows adding caption to a photo.

Till date, I have ignored that feature & only a handful of the pics held a caption.

However, the feature behaves bizarrely.
You enter a caption and then submit that. Then realize there was some error. If you recall that photo once again, the caption will not be there, forcing to retype everything.
However, if you come out of contributions & then access that once again, the caption will be there. Moreover, in a session beyond a certain count, the app will report “Server error. Please try after some time.”

Added to that, any attempt to edit also behaves weirdly.
When you place the cursor at the start of the text & enter something, the pointer jumps back to the end & the writing appears there.

Despite all these difficulties, I started including captions on a large scale.
The first discovery, some photos were redundant! I couldn’t describe any added significance of that another picture to a viewer.
Wherever I felt so, I purged the pic immediately.

In short, the exercise of adding a caption becomes a self-audit & helps in removing clutter.

To a great extent, that may put a brake on reporting “Not a photo or video of the place.” also.
I remember including a picture of Taj as seen from the Agra fort.
In no time, that became private.
True, the Taj was covering the most of the part in the frame & like so an instantaneous reaction of a cleanup enthusiast would be to report that.
However, that’s the view the emperor observed each day while being imprisoned in the fort! Nevertheless, one can’t prevent a jealous mind from doing so even then.

Over & above, I have noticed one more benefit of captions to detect private photos.
That, I shall describe in the following part.

By the way, the auto caption feature is still at an introductory phase & the current contributions may not include that automatically.

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The caption feature is very important for accessibility @C_T as it gives people who cannot see the image a description of what is shown. For example, blind people use screen readers. The screen reader when it encounters a photo will try to find a caption in the photo or an ALT TEXT tag in the HTML or a CAPTION style in the HTML and will then read that text to the user.

I expect the captions are likely used to help train the maps picture model.

Paul

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True @PaulPavlinovich

However, the process of adding captions is too involved and needs much improvement.

To add caption is too cumbersome. To cover the 2K collection, I needed to struggle for a fortnight.

Further, the auto caption also will need an edit.

The best practice would be to do that while one uploads the photo. That would need a disciplined approach.

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@C_T @PaulPavlinovich Thank you both, I will start to add caption from now on. Will the caption have an impact on viewing suggestion?

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Wow! I never knew about it.

since, adding the caption will help someone out there, I will start adding captions.

Thank you @PaulPavlinovich

Thank you @C_T

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I hope you’re sending feedback via the Maps App @C_T tell them how to make it better for you.

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I suspect that is secret sauce @OliverKIWI Google don’t tend to reveal how they rank images.

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Definitely people who use screen readers will find it helpful @Ewaade_3A

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Cool! I will bear it in mind @PaulPavlinovich See you tomorrow:)

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Great job worth preserving the masterpie

Thanks for your detailed post @C_T and I can add that I experienced all of the following idiosyncrasies and just gave up in frustration:

The Maps app allows adding caption to a photo. Till date, I have ignored that feature & only a handful of the pics held a caption. However, the feature behaves bizarrely. You enter a caption and then submit that. Then realize there was some error. If you recall that photo once again, the caption will not be there, forcing to retype everything. However, if you come out of contributions & then access that once again, the caption will be there. Moreover, in a session beyond a certain count, the app will report “Server error. Please try after some time.” Added to that, any attempt to edit also behaves weirdly. When you place the cursor at the start of the text & enter something, the pointer jumps back to the end & the writing appears there.

You mention an “auto caption feature” if this is something different to the default “Photo 1 of n” default caption please elaborate!

It’s pleasing to see that there is someone else who can see the benefit of captions and trying everything possible to achieve this!

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I totally agree with you @PaulPavlinovich that captions are very important and over the last two years I and others have been raising the captions problems and I made several suggestions in the Idea Exchange but sadly Google did not manage to implement the ideas in time so in my post Missing Photo Captions on Maps, a lost opportunity! I called out to see if anyone had a practical work around. But all to no avail!!! What do we have to do to raise the importance of this very important issue?

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Yes, I did that because I wanted to automate the discovery of “Private photos” @AdamGT .

Trust, you have gone through the second article on how to do that.
Nevertheless, I now follow the discipline of including a caption the moment I upload a photo. Hence I need not repeat that tedious exercise in the future once again.

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I’ve lost many photo captions? Anyone else experiencing this? Also, it is hard to get new ones to take.