this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2024
3 points (71.4% liked)

Self Hosted - Self-hosting your services.

11447 readers
42 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules

Important

Beginning of January 1st 2024 this rule WILL be enforced. Posts that are not tagged will be warned and if not fixed within 24h then removed!

Cross-posting

If you see a rule-breaker please DM the mods!

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
 

[question] Alt-text service, self hosted

Is there a service that I could plug into my misskey/firefish/whatev that provides an alt-text for an image I'm posting. I don't post images that often, so the few times, it would be nice to have an automatic OCR or LLM/Stable Diffusion description of a picture attached to it.

Of course, without depending on Google or similars.

Any ideas? cc @selfhost@lemmy.ml @selfhosted@lemmy.world

top 3 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] Deebster@programming.dev 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I feel that auto-generated descriptions are going to generally be terrible, even with the new GPT AIs. There's too much context needed to do a good job to be able to just feed an image into some code and get something useful.

On the other hand, transcriptions should be able to be done more accurately, particularly with a bit of extra logic to recognise forms like Twitter posts.

Some database of alt-texts might be possible by scraping for alt-texts and transcriptions from the fediverse, reddit, etc, but a quick search didn't come up with anything.

[–] alvaro@social.graves.cl 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

@Deebster@programming.dev maybe just OCR would be enough for a lot of cases

[–] Deebster@programming.dev 2 points 10 months ago

Yeah, that's what I mean by transcriptions; if you're mostly posting screenshots of social media posts then it'd probably work quite well, but if it's photos you're definitely going to need something more complicated.