How do I publish photo descriptions on Facebook using iPhoto?

Answer: Apple iPhoto '11 (version 9) includes a "Share" feature that allows you to publish photos directly to Facebook. You can either create new albums or add photos to existing albums. The upload process is pretty straightforward, but adding descriptions (captions) to each photo is not.

When you publish photos to Facebook using iPhoto, you may notice that all your images have descriptions like IMG_1760, IMG_1761, etc. This is because when you import images into iPhoto, the program automatically uses the filename (minus the file extension) as the image title. When iPhoto publishes your photos to Facebook, it uses the Title field for the description of each published image.

This can be confusing, since iPhoto also includes a Description field. You can access both the Title and Description fields by selecting View → Info while viewing a photo. If you add a description where it says "Add a description…," your Facebook photo caption will include the title, followed by two line breaks, then the description.

Therefore, the best way to caption your Facebook photos is to simply replace the title with the caption in iPhoto before you publish them. You can leave the description field blank unless you want to publish a long description for the photo. Following this tip will save you the time of manually updating all your captions after you publish your photos.

Published: July 6, 2012 — by Per Christensson