The Label Names What It Touches
Hand it a photograph and it annotates it by hand — each thing you name gets an outline, a leader line and the note you wrote, joined to the object rather than floating near it. Two fields.
One treatment, two different photographs. A workbench in white ink and a picnic blanket in dark, three notes each. The two runs disagree about one thing, and the disagreement is the useful part of the pair rather than a blemish on it.
The joins mostly work, which is what this template exists for: outlines follow real edges rather than circling near them, and the leaders land on the objects the notes are about. One miss on the workbench — the twine's leader forks, and one branch ends on the tin of nails, a thing the field never named. Follow every line from its writing before shipping; that is the check, and it caught this. The second finding is the template's and not the run's. The field is written as a pair, `the thermos: filled at six`, and it never says whether the thing-name is part of the note or only the address of it. The workbench run wrote the names out — the hand plane: still my grandfather's — and the picnic run wrote only what followed the colon. Both readings are defensible, which is what makes it a fault: two runs of one template, two different-looking pictures, and nothing in the words to settle it. Decide it in your own field by writing the note exactly as you want it to appear.
Generated for this library
Input
Annotate the hand plane: still my grandfather's ·
the coping saw: cuts everything but
straight · the twine: never enough
Pen a fine white line, one weight, and the same
white for the writing
Photograph workbench.png (1254 x 940)
Returned 1 image · 4:3 · the photograph, annotated
photo untouched - same crop, same light, nothing
retouched underneath
notes three things named, three annotations - and
none on the bench, the window or the floor
joins two land cleanly; the twine's leader forks and
one branch ends on the tin of nails, which
was never named
outlines traced along real edges - the tin's rim, the
saw's frame - not circles drawn near them
words the three notes as typed, and this run set the
thing-name too: the hand plane: still my
grandfather'sYou fill in 2 fields — the braced lines at the top. Everything below them is fixed.
- 1The things to annotate, and the note for each
- 2The pen it is drawn and written with
The Label Names What It Touches
What this makes
Hand it a photograph and it annotates it by hand — each thing you name gets an outline, a leader line and the note you wrote, joined to the object rather than floating near it. Two fields.
You are given ONE photograph. Return ONE image: the same photograph, untouched, annotated by hand on top of it. Follow every line. Replace only the FIELDS block; everything after it is fixed.
First — do you have the photograph and the fields?
Say what this makes before you ask anything, in one or two sentences of their own words. Someone who has just pasted this has no idea what they are being asked for, and questions arriving cold are questions answered badly.
If no photograph is attached, stop and ask for one. There is nothing to annotate without it.
If either field below still has braces around it, stop and ask. Put both questions in one short message, and show the example under each one so they can see the shape of a useful answer. Wait for the replies, then work. Never fill a brace yourself.
Ask in whatever language they are writing to you in. Translate the questions and the examples; do not make someone read English to tell you what they want.
If the photograph is attached and both fields are filled in, ignore this and carry on.
Fields — replace these two lines only
- The things to annotate, and the note for each: {a thing, then its note, one pair at a time}
- The pen it is drawn and written with: {an ink and a weight}
The law everything else follows from
The photograph is not touched. Everything added sits on top of it and looks it.
Nothing underneath is relit, recoloured, cropped, cleaned, sharpened or moved. The marks are a layer, and the whole point of the genre is that a viewer can see it is a layer: a photograph with something drawn on it is charming, and a photograph with something blended into it is a retouching job pretending to be one.
Every note is joined to its thing
This is the whole annotation, and it is three marks that belong together:
- An outline that follows the object's own edge — its real silhouette, not a circle or a rounded box near it. It may be a loose trace; it may not be a shape the object does not have.
- A leader line from that outline to the writing: one line, or a dashed one, or a line with a small arrowhead. It touches the outline at one end and stops at the writing at the other. A line that ends in space, or that starts near the object without meeting it, is the failure this template exists to catch.
- The note itself, in the reader's own words, set clear of the photograph's busy areas.
One set per pair in the field. No pair, no annotation. Do not annotate a thing the field did not name, however interesting it is — the source this comes from annotates every object it can find and then asks for restraint, which is a word doing a number's job.
The test is to follow the line. Start at each piece of writing, travel down its leader, and see what it lands on. If it lands on nothing, or on the wrong object, the annotation is wrong however good it looks.
The pen
- One ink and one weight, as the second field says, for the outlines, the leaders and the writing alike.
- Hand-drawn: the line wobbles slightly, corners are not square, a trace sometimes overshoots and doubles back.
- Flat. No shading, no glow, no drop shadow, no highlight. A mark has no light on it, because it is not in the scene.
Space
- Leave most of the photograph unmarked. Marks belong around the named objects and in the empty parts of the frame; the middle of the picture is not a place to write.
- No mark crosses a face, or any lettering already in the photograph.
- Nothing in the photograph is hidden. If a note has nowhere to go without covering something, make it smaller, not bolder.
The words
Only the notes the field gives, exactly as it gives them, character for character, in whatever language they are written in.
Handwritten in the pen the second field names, small, level, and beside the leader rather than across it.
The reference this was rewritten from asks the run to write the notes itself — short murmurs, diary-toned, in a named national handwriting style. That is how a stranger's voice ends up on a reader's photograph. Here, a thing named without a note is a mistake to ask about, not a gap to fill.
Never
- A word, a letter or a number the field did not give, in any script.
- An annotation on a thing the field did not name.
- A leader line that touches nothing, or an outline around empty space.
- Any change to the photograph underneath, including cropping, straightening, brightening or removing something.
- A frame, a border, a sticker, a watermark, a filter or a texture over the whole image.
- Marks in a second colour or a second weight.
What it should read as
Someone's photograph with someone's notes on it — the picture exactly as it was taken, and a few lines that plainly happened afterwards, each one pointing at the thing it is about.
The whole template, in one piece. The steps below are the entire workflow.
How to use it
- Copy the whole template with the button above.
- Attach your photograph and paste the template in the same message.
- Replace the two FIELDS lines. Write each thing and its note as one pair — the pairing is what stops a note drifting onto the wrong object.
- Check the joins before shipping: follow each line from its writing and see whether it lands on the thing the note is about.
- Write the notes in whatever language you like. They are set exactly as you typed them, so nothing arrives in a language you did not choose.
What you swap
- The things to annotate, and the note for each
- the hand plane: still my grandfather's · the coping saw: cuts everything but straight · the twine: never enough
- The pen it is drawn and written with
- a fine white line, one weight, and the same white for the writing
Before it runs
- An actual photograph, attached to the message. There is nothing to annotate without one.
- Objects with space around them. Every note needs somewhere to sit that is not on top of something else, so a frame packed corner to corner has nowhere to put the writing.
- Your own words for every note. The template writes nothing: a thing named with no note after it comes back with an outline and a line to nowhere.
- Three or four things, not ten. The source's own restraint clause is the word restraint, and it annotates everything it can find; the count here is however many you name, so name few.
When to reach for it
When a picture has to explain itself: a kit laid out, a recipe's ingredients, a desk someone wants to talk about, a shop's own how-it-works. Templates in this genre draw the lines beautifully and then write the captions themselves, so the notes on your photograph are a stranger's diary in a language you did not pick.
What changes
- One photograph in, one out — the photograph untouched, annotated over the top.
- Every note is joined to its object by a line that actually touches it, so nothing is left to be guessed at.
- The outline traces the object's real edge rather than a circle drawn near it.
- One note per thing you named, and none for anything you did not — the source annotates everything and calls it restraint.
- The words are yours, verbatim, in whatever language you wrote them.
Pairs with
- A Grade Moves No ShadowHand it a snapshot and it comes back graded — a named contrast curve, a named colour split, halation and grain — with every object, every shadow and the whole framing exactly where they were. Two fields.
- A Hole Has No Focal PlaneHand it a photograph and it takes the picture again through a pinhole — no lens, so nothing is ever truly sharp and nothing is ever more blurred than anything else, with the corners falling away because of simple geometry. Two fields.
- A Line at a Constant HeightHand it a photograph and it comes back as contour lines — every line a closed loop at one depth, none of them crossing, none of them stopping in mid-air, with the spacing doing all the shading. Two fields.