Colophon · 日本
Captioned by AI
Two couples spent two weeks in Japan in October 2024 and came home with nearly 2,000 photos. The pictures were vivid, but they were missing the context — where each was taken, what was happening, and the small cultural details that are easy to miss. Writing all of that by hand would have taken forever, so I had AI do it.
Every caption and every point of interest on this site is AI-generated. What makes captioning vacation photos hard isn't the captioning — it's the context: where and when a photo was taken, who took it, and who's actually in the frame. So the pipeline feeds the model all of that.
The pipeline
- 01 A Python script pulls EXIF data — GPS coordinates, timestamps, the photographer — from each photo.
- 02 Coordinates are reverse-geocoded into place names, and a map is generated from the GPS for context.
- 03 Each photo is sent to Claude, along with reference photos so it can identify who is actually in the shot.
- 04 Claude writes a caption in the site's voice and extracts notable points of interest, each linked to a real source.
- 05 A second pass reads the photos in trip order and harmonizes the captions so sequences read coherently.
- 06 Everything is stored in a SQLite database that this site reads from.
The voice
The captions are written from my perspective, in a deliberately casual, all-lowercase voice — like texting a friend. The whole collection was most recently regenerated with Claude Opus, which is a good deal sharper at reading a scene and identifying people than the model that first captioned the trip.