Having only relatively recently started to blog using Jekyll, I’ve only just come across the problem of trying to add captions to images - sans plugin.

Fortunately Jekyll is very easily extensible with some straight-forward HTML/CSS. Of course, following the framework’s separation of concerns, we need to do three things: Add markup to our _includes folder, update our stylesheet, and finally include a reference to our markup in the blog post file.

In the _includes folder, I created a new file called image.html, which includes,

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

with a CSS class center with properties adjusted to taste.

Turning to the blog post, I want to add,

{% include image.html url="/path/image.png" description="Caption" %}

making use of Jekyll’s include tag. Everything should be self-explanatory, although it should be said that I’ve used a relative path to the image file as prefxing url with site.BASE_PATH led to a Liquid Exception. Et voilà,

Salt of the Earth character
Salt of the Earth character

and of course we can add any sort of customisation from here.

All the best,

Tom


Tom Martin

Data scientist, London, UK