Everyone’s heard the old saying: a picture is worth a thousand words. That’s now a literal truth on social media–text heavy screencaps of excerpts from online articles or note-taking apps and reposts of lengthy screeds from other social media platforms are making regular appearances on the skyline. But what of image descriptions for these posts? Even if you’re able to extract the entire content of the piece from your image, everything from character 1001 onward will simply disappear once it’s pasted into the image alt text field. So. What now?
Here’s where you get to make a choice. It turns out that a LOT of people are now making the choice to use the alt text field to give a shoulder-shrug of a notice, simply saying that there’s too much verbiage to transcribe. Sometimes the statement comes with an apology. Sometimes it comes with a link to another place from which the entire posted text can be retrieved. Either way, it’s not particularly useful if you’re a person who’s reliant on that kind of information to glean information or context from posted images. On occasion, there will be a summary of the text in the image–that’s the helpful middle ground that allows at least a partial window into the message that’s being presented in the original piece.
Here’s option two. You can post multiple copies of the same image, or you can post placeholder images–up to a total of four images per post–to include up to 4000 characters worth of description for each image you post. And honestly, if your image post crosses 4000 characters, it might be better to just link directly to the info that you screen-capped anyway. Not sure what I mean? Have a look at this post on Bluesky and at the reply. The original image contained over 2000 characters, so the reply used the original image and two placeholders to capture the entire content.
As for actually extracting text, iOS has a Live Text tool that allows you to do it on the fly. You can also use Shortcuts to do the same thing if that fits your workflow better (that’s actually my preferred method, because OCR can potentially make mistakes, depending on how the text is laid out and on the font used in the image). In Android, you can send your images to Google Lens to use a tool that’s similar to Live Text. This video shows the basic elements of using Live Text or Lens for text extraction.
I mentioned Shortcuts earlier. If you’re an iOS type of person, I’ve written a couple that are linked below. One is a character counter. All it does is look at text-heavy images and count the number of characters it finds. The second actually extracts the text from the image. If it detects more than 1000 characters, it will divide the text into 950-character segments to make it easier to use with placeholder images and store the output in the Notes app. Fewer than 1000 characters will be deposited straight to the clipboard.
iOS Shortcut: Character Counter
iOS Shortcut: Extract Text From Image
Have fun. Happy Bluesky-ing.