The "Captions" Update
You can now add and edit captions for anything on mood!
Thanks for everyone that sent in feedback asking for this. It was, like rearranging, something I was reticent to add into mood, but enough people asked for it that I did it anyways!
It's also the first new premium-only feature I've added since launching the premium update. Anyone that has already upgraded to premium has immediate access to this feature. Free users can upgrade their boards to get access to this (and everything else!) immediately!
Captions Guide
You can add a caption by clicking the yellow pencil icon that appears on when hovering an image in the gallery.
Clicking this will open the caption editor relative to the image you're editing. In the caption editor, you can add text into the caption field, then save it by clicking the green checkmark, or cancel by clicking the "X" (or pressing Escape).
Additionally, by clicking the blue "return" icon or using Cmd/Ctrl+Enter while entering text, you can save the caption you're editing and go to the "next" image in the gallery and start editing its caption. This makes it easy to edit captions for everything in your gallery without needing to constantly use the mouse to click save, edit, etc.
You can also edit captions in the list view by clicking "Click to edit caption...". The same Cmd/Ctrl+Enter shortcut works here as well, so you can quickly edit all the captions in a line.
Some Reflections
My original thinking around mood was that it was meant to be a more ephemeral space for sharing and collaborating on image galleries with people. The reticence I mentioned above stemmed mostly from that use case — "why spend time to caption images on a board you're going to toss away".
However, what I've learned from you all is that the sites you build with mood are (often) much longer lived. They act as a place you use where you collect things over time. You treat mood more like a Pinterest or Tumblr alternative, and less like a sketch on the back of a napkin.
It's a use case I didn't totally anticipate but am happy to help people out in pursuing. Mood still retains its core use and feature set for that "ephemeral" case, but with things like customization, rearranging, and now captions, I'm happy to build out more features in mood that make it feel more like a space you can curate and share, not just one to be forgotten.
If you have any other features or thoughts, feel free to reach out to me via the contact form on the site. Thanks to everyone who's been using mood! And especially to premium users, you help keep the site afloat!
Upcoming
I wasn't fully expecting to do captions so soon, but something came up that sort of forced my hand. The next feature I wanted to implement was the ability to seed a new board with images (so you don't have to find your own to start). My plan with this was to use Unsplash, but Unsplash has some strict requirements around API use, and as such meant I needed a way to show text on images. So I decided to build and push captions as a step along that path, but I'm hoping to have the "seeded gallery" feature live in the next few weeks.
And then there is still this list of features I expect to come up soon as well!
- (Premium) Different default sorting methods (reverse chronological, random)
- (Premium) Use images as board backgrounds
- (Everyone) Link previews when sharing boards