Alt Text? There’s an Agent for That
Bluesky taught me alt text is important, so I automated it.
f Bluesky taught me anything, it’s that alt text is necessary upon threat of death and bullying. I get it. I think it’s really important for our photographs to be able to be seen by everyone.
However, it is a bit onerous to type out alt text for every single photograph you publish. Especially if you’re a photographer.
So I’ve created a small agent that creates alt text.
Let’s walk through it.
First , I record a voice memo on my phone and send it through an Apple shortcut to a webhook on my N8N server.
On that server, it instantly does two things.
- It takes that file and runs it through Qwen 3.5:9b to analyze and ascertain alt text.
- Reads the EXIF metadata, so I can get photograph information.
I merge those two together, prepare the payload, and then append to a note in Obsidian - so I have a central place where all these alt texts go.
It’s super useful and super quick.
I can grab ten photos from my photo roll, stick them all into this, and they’ll all show up into Obsidian.
What I also like about it is I don’t have to automatically post. I’m just generating alt text, being ready for anything that I want to do with it. Some examples below.
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