How to reduce the size of captions in all figures

Question

I want the captions of my figures and table to have the same size as \footnotesize. Is there something to put in the preambule of my document to do this?

Answer 1

Use the caption package to set the font key-value to footnotesize:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{caption}
\captionsetup{font=footnotesize}
\begin{document}

Some regular text set in \verb|\normalsize|.
\begin{table}[t]
  \caption{A table using \texttt{\string\footnotesize}.}
\end{table}
\begin{figure}[t]
  \caption{A figure using \texttt{\string\footnotesize}.}
\end{figure}

\end{document}

It is also possible to adjust the label and text formats individually for figures and tables separately. However, consistency is a better option here.