How to turn captions on and off in Instagram

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

If you watch a video on the app, it can be automatically transcribed into an auto-generated caption. If you want to post videos with caption in the app, you'll have to enable the feature first.

The auto-generated caption is available in 17 languages at the time of writing: English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Arabic, Vietnamese, Italian, German, Turkish, Russian, Thai, Tagalog, Urdu, Malay, Hindi. There will be support for more languages in the future.

If you want to post a video with subtitles or just want to watch a video with a caption, this is how to turn it on and off.

Turn on / off captions for all videos in your feed

The auto-generated caption is turned off by default. You just need to adjust a single setting if you want to turn the caption on for every video in your feed. You can turn the caption off by repeating the steps.

• Tap your profile in the bottom right corner of the screen.
• Select the hamburger menu in the top right of the screen, and then select Settings.
• Go to Account > Captions, and then toggle the Captions option on. You can toggle the Captionsoption back again if you wish to turn them off.

Turn on captions for a single video

If you don't want the caption on every video, you can turn on the caption for a single video. This is how to do it.

• Tap the three dots in the top-right corner of a video.
• If the video supports captions, you’ll see an option that says Manage Captions.
• Toggle on the Captions option.

Posting a video with captions

The auto-generated videos on the photo sharing site come in handy for creators as well, as this means you won't have to add a caption to your videos. When creating a post, follow these steps to turn the caption on or off.

• Start by uploading a video from your gallery or shooting one within Instagram.
• When you’re finished applying any edits, select AdvancedSettings from the menu that appears before you post your video.
• Under Accessibility, toggle the Show Captions option on or off.

After you post a video, you can always turn on the caption.

• Tap the three dots that appear in the top-right corner of your video, then tap Edit.
• On Android, select Remove Captionsto disable them.On an iPhone, hit Advanced Settings and then toggle the Show captions option on or off.