Medium Story Formatting
How to Properly Caption Your Medium Story Photos
Remove all doubt about copyright or licensing issues
There is no doubt that having a great photo at the top of your article is one of the main drivers to get people to read your story.
Second only to a great title and subtitle, pictures are one of the things that brings the reading throngs to your doorstep. That being the case, almost everyone uses them. However, not everyone uses them correctly.
Medium offers us this advice when using photos in our stories: “Double-check to make sure you’re not violating copyright or licensing with your images” in their Member Content Guidelines.
Beyond that, there is little advice offered for how to assure that you don’t violate image copyrights.
However, there is a two-step solution to assure that you don’t violate image copyrights or licensing:
1. Use pictures that are licensed for free use. Unsplash, Pexels and Pixabay are great sources for pictures licensed for free use by anyone. There are other sites out there as well, or you may hold a license for use through purchase like with Adobe Stock.
2. Caption your photos. Make sure you caption your photos to describe where the photo was obtained, and if applicable, give credit to the artist.
That’s it. Easy.
So, let’s talk about just how to do that. In the Medium story editor (when you click the “New Story” link) any time you hit enter or move to a new spot the “+” icon will appear.
Click on the icon and a menu will appear like this:
Your choices:
Unsplash. Unsplash is the “Easy Button” for photo selection and captioning. Type any word into the search bar and choose from the photos displayed. When you click on one it presents into the editor screen like this:
Unsplash has a great selection of photos and your work is done for you. That is why most writers use them.
Pexels, Pixabay, Adobe Photostock, etc. One downside of everyone using Unsplash is that some photos get re-used across numerous articles. You want your story to be unique, as the picture is part of the whole package of content you are delivering. For that reason, people will migrate to other free sites to find photos. That is great. But those sites won’t automatically caption your photo for you. You have to do a little work.
If I get a photo from Pixabay (my go-to after Unsplash) I always download the photo rather than
Then just hit the “+” icon, select the photo option and locate where you saved the photo on your computer. Once you select the photo, it will appear just as the Unsplash photo did (above) and you have the option to alter the size and how it appears in relation to the text.
However, the photo won’t be captioned. You have to do that.
Highlight the photo if your cursor isn’t there already and grey placeholder text will appear under the photo:
Just click on the grey placeholder text and type in your caption like this:
That is all you need to do. But you can earn extra credit karma points by linking the photo back to its origin. Not necessary, but nice. To do this you can click on the
Then go to your photo caption and highlight either the site or author and click on the hyperlink button. Paste in the link and hit
Clip art, personal photos, charts, illustrations or drawings
Okay, in this category the chances of licensing or copyright issues are less. Most people aren’t going to get hung up on free clip art use, nor is your neighbor Bill likely to sue you if you use his selfie of the two of you fishing in your story.
However, our motto is to:
Remove all doubt! Always caption the art, photo, graph or whatever.
Charts and graphs hijacked from a website could possibly cause problems if you don’t have permission for use. So you need to find a source where you are certain that the images are licensed for free use.
Wikimedia Commons is a good source for free licensed content such as charts, graphs and illustrations. They even have a good stockpile of historical photos.
If you use something from Wikimedia Commons, click on the “Use this file” link which will bring up a dialogue box that contains the contributor. For the illustration below you would say, “Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Illustration by Jahobr / CCo.”
You can also get the karmic bonus points as above by copying the illustration link and using the hyperlink in the caption to link back to the source.
Here is a list of potential captions to cover a variety of different situations for clip art, illustrations, graphs, etc.:
- Illustration by Author.
- Field of flowers. Photo by Author.
- Author in boat. Photo credit Susie Smith.
- Photo by Author.
- Painting by Author.
- Painting by Joe Smith. Used with permission by Author.
- I drew this.
- Etc. You get the point.
Just write something in the caption so that the reader, any publication editors, the staff at Medium, and the world at large knows where you got the image.
The part where the grey placeholder text says, “Optional”? Best practice says ignore that and write something, anything, in that space so there is no doubt about the licensing and copyright of the image.
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Timothy Key spent over 26 years in the fire service as a firefighter/paramedic and various fire chief management roles. He firmly believes that bad managers destroy more than companies, and good managers create a passion that is contagious. Compassion, grace and gratitude drive the world; or at least they should. Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, and join the mail list.
