Using an image caption in Markdown Jekyll

Question

I am hosting a Jekyll Blog on Github and write my posts with Markdown. When I am adding images, I do it the following way:

![name of the image](http://link.com/image.jpg)

This then shows the image in the text.

However, how can I tell Markdown to add a caption which is presented below or above the image?

Answer 1

If you don't want to use any plugins (which means you can push it to GitHub directly without generating the site first), you can create a new file named image.html in _includes:

<figure class="image">
  <img src="{{ include.url }}" alt="{{ include.description }}">
  <figcaption>{{ include.description }}</figcaption>
</figure>

And then display the image from your markdown with:

{% include image.html url="/images/my-cat.jpg" description="My cat, Robert Downey Jr." %}

Answer 2

Here's the simplest (but not prettiest) solution: make a table around the whole thing. There are obviously scaling issues, and this is why I give my example with the HTML so that you can modify the image size easily. This worked for me.

| <img src="" alt="" style="width: 400px;"/> |
| My Caption |

Answer 3

You can try to use pandoc as your converter. Here's a jekyll plugin to implement this. Pandoc will be able to add a figure caption the same as your alt attribute automatically.

But you have to push the compiled site because github doesn't allow plugins in Github pages for security.

Answer 4

You can use table for this. It works fine.

| ![space-1.jpg](http://www.storywarren.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/space-1.jpg) | 
|:--:| 
| *Space* |

Result:

Answer 5

The correct HTML to use for images with captions, is <figure> with <figcaption>.

There's no Markdown equivalent for this, so if you're only adding the occasional caption, I'd encourage you to just add that html into your Markdown document:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit...

<figure>
  <img src="{{site.url}}/assets/image.jpg" alt="my alt text"/>
  <figcaption>This is my caption text.</figcaption>
</figure>

Vestibulum eu vulputate magna...

The Markdown spec encourages you to embed HTML in cases like this, so it will display just fine. It's also a lot simpler than messing with plugins.

If you're trying to use other Markdown-y features (like tables, asterisks, etc) to produce captions, then you're just hacking around how Markdown was intended to be used.

Answer 6

A slight riff on the top voted answer that I found to be a little more explicit is to use the jekyll syntax for adding a class to something and then style it that way.

So in the post you would have:

![My image](/images/my-image.png)

{:.image-caption}
*The caption for my image*

And then in your CSS file you can do something like this:

.image-caption {
  text-align: center;
  font-size: .8rem;
  color: light-grey;

Comes out looking good!