AI captions and keywords

Magpie can write a short caption for each photo and suggest a few keywords. They help you find a photo by what is in it, and they give screen readers something to read out.

What you get

• A caption: one plain sentence about what is visible, for example “A sandcastle on a beach at sunset”.
• Up to eight keywords, such as “beach” or “sandcastle”. They start out as suggestions, shown as Keywords suggested by AI, until someone keeps or removes them.

Captions and keywords describe what can be seen. The model is instructed not to guess who someone is, or their age, ethnicity or health.

They are written in the library owner’s language when the photo is processed. They are not rewritten if that language changes later.

When they appear

You don’t have to do anything. Captions are written in the background, in batches that start about every 15 minutes. A new photo is usually described within 2 hours, and always within 24 hours of its preview being ready. A large library that has just switched this on takes longer to catch up.

Some photos are skipped:

• photos in the trash;
• guest uploads that are still waiting in the review inbox (they are described once you accept them);
• videos, and RAW files that have no preview yet.

Where you see them

Open a photo in the viewer (see Look at a photo up close). The caption is shown with the label Written by AI, and it is also the picture’s text for screen readers. A photo with no caption shows no caption line.

Keep or remove a keyword

If you can edit tags in the library (an editor or the owner), each suggested keyword has two buttons:

• Keep a keyword to make it permanent.
• Remove a keyword to dismiss it. It won’t be suggested again for that photo.

You can also use the keyboard. Tab to a keyword, then press Enter to keep it or Delete (or Backspace) to remove it. With a keyword selected, Delete only removes that keyword; it never moves the photo to the trash.

Viewers and contributors can read the caption and the keywords but can’t change them.

What is sent to Anthropic

Anthropic, an AI company, writes the captions for us. For each photo, Magpie sends only a reduced preview, never your original file. Under Anthropic’s API terms, what we send is not used to train its models.

Switch it off

Only the library’s owner can change this.

1. Open Settings.
2. Find the AI captions and keywords card.
3. Turn it off. The card shows Off.

Switching off stops new captions from being requested straight away. Photos already being sent to Anthropic at that moment are not recalled, but their results are discarded. Switching off also deletes the captions, and any keywords nobody has kept. Keywords someone kept stay, because a person chose them. Switching it on again starts fresh: the photos are described again from scratch.

Which plans include it

AI captions come with the plans that include AI search.

If a library moves to a plan without it, no new captions are written. The ones already there stay.