Why Captions, Keywords, and Other Metadata Still Matters in 2026

After my recent video on using Siri to add captions and keywords to photos, someone on social media asked a question that kind of took me aback: “What's the point?” I had assumed everyone who was in any way into photography understood the benefit of adding keywords and captions, but I guess not. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense in a way. Phones recognise faces. Most software (except Lightroom Classic, because…Adobe) can find "dog on a beach" without a single piece of user-generated metadata, and AI seems to know what's in every picture. So why bother writing anything by hand?