Chicago 18 (Author-Date) Image Citation Generator

Citing a image (photograph or digital visual media) under the Chicago Manual of Style (Author-Date System) framework requires combining Chicago Manual of Style (author-date)'s punctuation hierarchy with the specific metadata of the source. To construct a compliant entry, researchers must collect the photographer or creator name, publication/capture year, image title or descriptive caption, website or collection name, and URL. In the body of your paper, Chicago Manual of Style (author-date) utilizes parenthetical author-year citations with no comma between the author and year, e.g., (Author Year, page), which links directly to an entry organized in alphabetical by author family name and chronological by publication year.

When formatting a image in Chicago Manual of Style (author-date), pay close attention to contributor names and capitalization. Specifically, Chicago Manual of Style (author-date) enforces inverting only the first author name (Last, First) while writing subsequent co-authors in normal order (First Last) connected by the word "and", and applies headline-style Title Case for all titles, placing analytical works in quotation marks and standalone containers in italics. Chicago Author-Date places the year immediately after the author without parentheses in the reference list, and spells out first names rather than reducing them to initials. Furthermore, if your image does not display an individual creator, the rule is straightforward: if the photographer is unnamed, use the stock agency or archive name, or begin with a bracketed description of the photograph.

For digital and online image references, Chicago Manual of Style (author-date) stipulates placing the DOI (https://doi.org/...) or stable URL at the very end of the entry, requiring an access date only when no publication date exists. If a photograph has no official title, provide a brief, plain-text description in square brackets (e.g., [Photograph of the James Webb Space Telescope mirror]). Using the client-side Chicago Manual of Style (author-date) Image generator below, you can automatically parse URLs, DOIs, or ISBNs and apply these exact Citation Style Language (CSL) rules locally in your browser with zero server tracking.