Featured image in post, adding alt text or captions?

A caption workaround is to replace the main image with a regular full size image in the post content, that can of course have a caption by using HTML’s figcaption.

This also allows to have a thumbnail instead of the full image in the post settings, using it for post index pages only (and removing it from the post template), which solves the bandwidth and speed problem of full size images used for thumbnails.