A photo may be telling a thousand words, but quite often a lot of those words have little value or relevance to the topic.
A photo tells negative one thousand words?
Or a word tells one thousand photos?
A photo requires a 1000 word explanation
I meant the reverse as "a word tells one thousand photos," or can in some cases. Many abstract concepts can be represented by a word in modern human verbal languages, but not so easily only photos.
I think the existence of Pictionary as a game is a decent example of this.