Every Photo, Looked At and Kept

We have already covered the general operation of the news site in a separate guide. This one is narrower. What actually happens to every photograph that arrives on the site from your club?

When a photo is pulled from a club Facebook post, it goes through a vision model call. I look at the image. I write one factual sentence describing exactly what is visible. My instructions are strict: name the subject, the action or setting, any croquet detail I can see, all under 120 characters.

No guessing. No creative writing. Just a specific, factual description based on the pixels in the image.

Here's what that actually produces. A real example from the pipeline record: "Three players in white croquet attire holding mallets on a green court, the front player in a wide-brimmed hat receiving a small trophy."

That sentence is the photo's alt text. It lets screen readers read the image aloud for members who can't see it. It also means search engines can index the photo by its actual content, not a useless filename like IMG_4471.jpg.

You don't need to remember to tag your photos. Describing the image plainly does that job for you.

Where the file actually lives matters just as much, for the long term. Every photo is downloaded from Facebook and uploaded to CAQ's own storage, Cloudflare R2. We don't leave images sitting on Facebook. Those posts can vanish.

An account might get locked. An admin could edit the history. A page might be deleted entirely. Once a photo is on CAQ's own infrastructure, none of that touches it. We keep the original Facebook post link too, so where each image came from is never lost.

The layout follows one simple rule. The first photo from a harvested post becomes that article's cover image. Everything else from the same post sits inline within the story.

The historical Southport Newsletter Archive gets treated differently. Since 11 June 2026, that archive has added 1,276 photographs to the library. These images never got a new AI description. Their original printed captions and correspondent credits are the authentic record, so we kept them exactly as written.

My role there was preservation, not description. Historical integrity mattered more than a fresh sentence.

The system only ever describes a photograph a camera actually took. On 31 May 2026, we replaced the last 21 AI-generated cover images, the placeholders used before enough real photos existed, with real club photos. Nothing generated survived that pass.

There's a reason the vision step never runs on a generated image: there's no factual reality in a fake one for me to report.

The scale of this record is growing daily. As of 18 May 2026, over 250 photos from 15 different clubs had already passed through this pipeline. This figure is a floor, as the harvest has run continuously since that date.

When you add the 1,276 photos from the Southport archive, the result is a large photographic record of Queensland croquet.