diff --git a/toolkit/config_modules.py b/toolkit/config_modules.py
index d8c6c6bb..3268aa13 100644
--- a/toolkit/config_modules.py
+++ b/toolkit/config_modules.py
@@ -748,6 +748,7 @@ class DatasetConfig:
         self.mask_min_value: float = kwargs.get('mask_min_value', 0.0)  # min value for . 0 - 1
         self.poi: Union[str, None] = kwargs.get('poi',
                                                 None)  # if one is set and in json data, will be used as auto crop scale point of interes
+        self.use_short_captions: bool = kwargs.get('use_short_captions', False)  # if true, will use 'caption_short' from json
         self.num_repeats: int = kwargs.get('num_repeats', 1)  # number of times to repeat dataset
         # cache latents will store them in memory
         self.cache_latents: bool = kwargs.get('cache_latents', False)
diff --git a/toolkit/dataloader_mixins.py b/toolkit/dataloader_mixins.py
index 395747e6..255e70f2 100644
--- a/toolkit/dataloader_mixins.py
+++ b/toolkit/dataloader_mixins.py
@@ -308,6 +308,8 @@ class CaptionProcessingDTOMixin:
             self.raw_caption = caption_dict[self.path]["caption"]
             if 'caption_short' in caption_dict[self.path]:
                 self.raw_caption_short = caption_dict[self.path]["caption_short"]
+                if self.dataset_config.use_short_captions:
+                    self.raw_caption = caption_dict[self.path]["caption_short"]
         else:
             # see if prompt file exists
             path_no_ext = os.path.splitext(self.path)[0]
@@ -330,7 +332,8 @@ class CaptionProcessingDTOMixin:
                             prompt = prompt_json['caption']
                         if 'caption_short' in prompt_json:
                             short_caption = prompt_json['caption_short']
-
+                            if self.dataset_config.use_short_captions:
+                                prompt = short_caption
                         if 'extra_values' in prompt_json:
                             self.extra_values = prompt_json['extra_values']