Ex-cameraman builds AI photo caption tool solo after spending 20 minutes per post

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Marco, a 25-year TV cameraman turned photographer based in Dublin, built CAPTD to solve a personal pain point: writing captions, hashtags, and alt text for photos was taking him 20 minutes per post. Using AI-assisted development despite no prior coding experience, he created the tool over roughly six months using TanStack Start, Supabase, Google Gemini, and Vercel. CAPTD generates platform-specific content packs for nine social networks, supports ten languages, and includes features like a Creator Voice tone system and a free 28-lesson photography academy. The platform requires no signup to use its core generator, a deliberate decision by Marco to lower the barrier for new users. A major post-redesign bug silently broke multi-language output and mobile generation without triggering any errors, marking a critical challenge in the tool's development.

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