WordPress has this amazing feature known as Post Thumbnails also referred to as Featured Images. When uploading a post thumbnail, you are asked to add a caption, description, along with other fields, but when you get ready to display it, it only shows the image. In this article, we will share a small trick that will let you display captions or entire image descriptions with your post thumbnail.
First thing first, you need to enable Post Thumbnails in your WordPress Theme. Now, when you upload an image using the media uploader, you will see something like this:
You will need to go ahead and fill all of the information. Now one thing that many folks do not know is that WordPress stores each image as its own post. So the Title of the Image will be the title of the post, Caption will be the excerpt of the post, and Description will be the content of the post. So you can display all of these information when you are displaying your WordPress Thumbnail.
To display your post thumbnail with its caption, simply paste the following code inside the loop:
<?php the_post_thumbnail(); echo get_post(get_post_thumbnail_id())->post_excerpt; ?>
You can obviously style it the way you want to style it.
You can also display entire image description by adding this code inside the post loop:
<?php the_post_thumbnail(); echo get_post(get_post_thumbnail_id())->post_content; ?>
This really simple trick can go long way in styling your next custom WordPress theme.
Sry, I don´t rly get it…
In which loop exactly do i have to paste the code?
Maybe it´s just me being brain-afk, sry for that.
In the loop where you want to display thumbnails with captions. This could be your single.php file, or any other files.
Thank you for this!!!
Thanks a lot, I have been looking for this and this is the best and simple explanation of how to add the image caption for featured images.
Thanks
Use this article:
http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-themes/how-to-display-custom-fields-outside-the-loop-in-wordpress/
Short neat and to the point. Only critic goes for not providing example output for the short article. For other readers: Remember to read the related posts!
How can I style the caption?
It is rendering the caption line outside of the DIV class in the source code? What am I doing wrong.
Thanks in advance,
Gary
You can wrap the echo content in a div of its own.
I have been banging my head against a wall for about 4 hours trying to figure out how to wrap the echo content in its own div. (PHP noob here).
Can you give me an example of how it would look to wrap the div on that echo?
Do it like this:
echo ‘open div here’ . get_post(get_post_thumbnail_id())->post_excerpt . ‘close div here’;
This is great. Very helpful. Thank you so much! But it would really be helpful to show a screenshot of the result.
This little gem comes in handy when wanting to spruce up most of the free themes out there… nice, quick and easy.