Caption, location and tags

What sets a post apart is not the file but the text you write under it and the tags you add: the right caption brings sales, while a people tag in the wrong place stops the post from publishing at all. This guide covers every field on the Details step, its limits and the types it works on.

💡 This step never appears on a story. A story carries no caption, location, people tags or collaborators; instead you see a single line of explanation on screen.

In this article you will find:

• The caption field and its counter
• Reels settings
• Location
• People tags
• Collaborators
• The warning when you switch to a story
• Common mistakes and how to fix them

The caption field and its counter

The Caption box is the text that will appear under the post. It is a five-line field, and the hint below it shows two numbers live: "2,050 characters left · 4 / 30 hashtags".

The limits are Meta's:

• At most 2,200 characters. The field stops at that count; you cannot type more.
• At most 30 hashtags (#). Going over produces "The caption can hold at most 30 hashtags." when you publish.
• At most 20 mentions (@). Going over produces "The caption can hold at most 20 mentions."

The hashtag counter counts every word beginning with a #, including words with non-Latin letters. The mention counter counts words beginning with @ that contain only letters, digits, dots and underscores.

Mentions in a caption and people tags are different things: a mention sits inside the text and everyone reads it, while a people tag sits on the media and puts the person into the "Who is in this post" list. You can use both together.

💡 Putting hashtags at the end of the caption, after a blank line, keeps the text readable and leaves the first two lines in the feed for the product itself.

Reels settings

This section appears on the Reels type only and sits collapsed; tap its heading to open it. It holds four fields.

Cover frame (ms) — Which millisecond of the video becomes the cover. It is written as a number; entering 2000, for instance, makes the second second of the video the cover. Left empty, Instagram uses the first frame.

Choose cover image — You pick a separate photo from the library as the cover. Once picked, a button appears.