Why does nobody talk about image captioning eating all your API credits

Spent last Friday trying to auto-caption a folder of 400 product photos for a client site. Thought I'd be clever and use a vision model API. Set up the script, ran it, went to grab lunch. Came back to a bill of $86 and only 150 photos done. The captions were also garbage, stuff like 'a red object on a table' for a clearly labeled vacuum cleaner. I should have just hired a freelancer for $50 and been done in an afternoon. Took me 3 hours to realize the real fix was just writing a template that pulled from the filename and SKU. Anyone else burn cash on a fancy tool only to find the boring manual way was faster?

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lucas_grant831mo ago

Dodged a similar bullet last month trying to caption some old family photos for a slideshow thing. Dropped $40 into an AI tool before realizing it kept calling my uncle's classic car a 'rusty truck' and my grandma's garden 'a bunch of green stuff.' Ended up just typing the captions myself in like two hours while watching a ballgame. The worst part is the AI was super confident about its wrong answers too, like it would double down on 'red object' when the photo was clearly a blue couch. I swear these vision models are just guessing colors half the time. Now I just keep a notepad file with the captions and copy paste them in, costs me nothing and takes way less time than fighting with the API.