The main purpose of this article is to consider certain genres of natural writing. The very concept of “natural written speech” at the present time has not received a complete and comprehensive interpretation. However, there are fewer examples of it today. In part, the disappearance of the genres of natural writing is associated with the onset of the digital era, when people stopped writing physical letters and notes, ceased making notes for themselves, and no longer annotated and signed photographs. Many genres of writing are capable of giving an idea of the writer in the same way as the varieties of oral speech. In natural written speech, some features of personality and linguistic personality are manifested. The aim of the research, presented in the article, is to analyse inscriptions on photographs from the viewpoint of their lexis, punctuation, and graphical layout to define the chronotope and personal characteristics of the authors of this genre of written discourse. The focus is on the linguistic means of inscriptions on photos, i. e., the graphic, lexical, derivational and other features. In the process of analysing the inscriptions, the main varieties of this genre were identified: inscriptions made as a memento; inscriptions that represent the definition of an event or time and place; inscriptions made to convey information to close relatives, etc. In addition, the inscriptions on photographs can be classified by keywords, if possible, determining the chronotope, by the use of graphic means, by the location of the inscription itself in the photograph. To a certain extent, the inscriptions made on photographs reflect the personality traits of a person. The analysis shows that inscriptions on photographs were a forerunner of sorts of personal pages on Instagram.