Stone Design Forums

PTW has the enormous benefit of being able to attach Captions and Stories. This is very helpful for short albums/catalogs, which I define as 50 photos or less.

It's a simple enough matter for a client/sender to upload a folder with 50 jpgs to a staging folder on a server and for me to download the folder to my desktop and drag the folder into PTW's Main Window.

The problem comes when I want/need to find an efficient way to move 50 corresponding captions and/or stories into PTW. Ideally, I'd like to be able to somehow instruct PTW to go to an accompanying file containing the accompanying 50 captions/stories and copy and paste them into the corresponding caption/story window.

Short of copy and paste (50 x), there are probably many ways to do this, but, rather than re-invent the wheel, I am just wondering if PTW users have found a solution they find particularly cheap, simple and effective?

TIA

fjd

If you added a caption/notes in iPhoto, then using the iPhoto to PhotoToWeb exporter brings those along for the ride...

AS --

The Title, Caption and Text iPhoto come along for the ride.

That just pushes the (same) problem back one step. Most people who will send me photos for their sites do not have a Mac, much less iPhoto.

If I get a folder (say, on pen drive) containing 50 (jpg) photos and a Word (or other) file with 100 paragraphs (50 captions, 50 text paragraphs), I will need to do quite a lot of copy/paste to get the captions/text into PTW.

I was looking for a way to automate this process so PTW would fetch each of the 50 captions/texts and paste them into the (proper) boxes in its Main Window.

TIA.

What I think you are looking for is an Applescript that takes each paragraph of a document and places it in subsequent caption/text in P2W.

Can anyone write it?

Blond --

That sounds right. I think the question I have is -- if I am regularly going to receive Caption/Text, in what format should it be sent so that anybody anywhere can easily send me Caption/Text and so that I can then apply the script to N number of photos in PTW?

Otherwise, I will get something in Word, something in Excel, etc. and will need to write a number of scripts.

Maybe I will need a site with an on-line form with three fields into which users can drag the photos and the Caption and the Text...???

Thanks.

I will report to this board whatever I find out of my own accord.

AS --

I recently asked on this board: How might people reliably send (to each other and to me) Caption and Story information to accompany JPG photos in PTW?

An answer (as I understand it) may reside in three EXIF fields that can contain up to 1,999 bytes each:
1. IP-edit-status
2. Main Image IFD Fields
(a) Description
(b) Doc-Name

In other words, what I am inquiring about is that those SENDING photos to someone using PTW embed those photos with Title, Caption and Story information in one or more of these three EXIF fields found within each JPG.

Embedding raises two (related) issues:
(a) On the Mac and Windows platforms, what (low cost) software would reliably and easily accomplish this goal?
(b) Within PTW, what would be the most efficient way to reliably extract embedded Title, Caption and Story information from EXIF Fields and to automatically place it into the Title, Caption and Story fields?

TIA.

fjd

Access to EXIF/IFIF and other meta data is available on Tiger and beyond - for example, choose Image -> Info on an image in iMaginator. You can edit and add the tags there. Again, you've had to manually deal with tags.

Figuring out how the user wants to map this info to the PTW fields would be a challenge, and currently, PTW is shipped to work on the last 3 operating systems.

But I could consider this feature in a future release.

Have a look at this for some background on Exif

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exif

Maybe not the simplest format to hack into.

Here is an Exif editor

http://www.end-if.de/E/Products/Informa ... mator.html

My favoured solution is to use a file format open to all and read the data from there. RTF or spreadsheet? My preferred would be Neo Office or Excel spreadsheet. Andrew is it possible to extract the field info from this type of file or should I say is it simple?

Does anyone know any good books to learn Applescript?

EXIF is way over my paygrade, but, more importantly, ubiquitous. iPhoto, Portfolio and Aperture all take advantage of EXIF to one degree or another.

I am not familiar with Neo office; Excel is an old stand-by, but I think its max field length is 256 characters (last time I looked) and is overkill for what I want to do.

Thanks for your comments. I will take a closer look at both suggestions.

fjd

I use NeoOffice for spreadsheets, I use it most working days and have not had a problem yet. It can also save to Excel format and is free.

http://www.neooffice.org/neojava/en/index.php

AS --

>>Figuring out how the user wants to map this info to the PTW fields would be a challenge, and currently, PTW is shipped to work on the last 3 operating systems.<<

From a technical perspective, I simply have no clue how much time/effort would be involved in mapping some (which?) EXIF fields to PTW.

For me, the issue is not EXIF per se, but efficiently and effectively getting text (Title, Caption and Story) from others (not always photographers) to me to include in PTW so I can include PTW in Create-created sites.

The EXIF idea is appealing simply because it appears that, from a non-techncial perspective, EXIF provides wht seems like a convenient way to eliably transmit text from clients/photographers (not always the same) to the PTW fields.

Maybe there is a an OSX (or Vista) widget/shareware (and not just iMaginator) that could provide any user anywhere the ability to input text into JPGs.

If there are such tools, then the issue becomes: is there a widget (or feature in PTW) that would enable those receiving the jpgs to extract the text for use in PTW?

This may be a chicken-and-the-egg issue -- it may simply not make any sense (for you) to go thru all the effort of making it possible/easy to extract information from PTW until there are easy and reliable and near universal tools to input the information into photos.

There are lots of sites where one can post photos (for free), and there are lots of sites where one can post blogs or other text about photos that are posted elsewhere.

In general, keeping Title, Caption and Story (text) together with a photo is often a non-trivial matter for many in that it requires so much effort and attention. In this context, putting text inside a photo seems like a no-brainer -- except that fail-safe tools for inputting and extracting text are are not as ubiquitous as, say, Excel in offices.

If you are like most people, it's hard to finished a sentence without getting interrupted, so the task of taking 50, 500 or 5000 photos and making sure they all have the proper text (Title, Caption and Story) is not one that I relish doing.

>>But I could consider this feature in a future release.<<
Thank you, and I will keep you updated on what others might suggest as a way to solve this problem.

fjd

From a Web Design perspective the narrative often has to come from the client and often many of the photos too. In an office environment the text may be dictated to a secretary. Photos may be in different formats some of which do not support Exif. Support for RAW format is developing slowly. I think the solution needs to be robust.

Agreed, but a partial solution for JPG-only would be a good start.

Right now, as you note, there are multiple ad-hoc (Excel, Neo-Office, cut/paste, etc.) work-arounds, but there is nothing reliable, and certainly no solution in sight.

In my view, AS is way ahead of the game by making text an integral part of photo/albums. PTW in this sense is a misnomer -- it does not create Photo-to-web sites, rather it creates photo-journalism sites.

EXIF had traditionally warehoused technical information about photos, but the photo and text world (files/formats) live apart until the are brought back together in (on-line) newspapers.

If we considered text as an integral part of a photo, then, yes, we need robust tools to make photo-text a day-to-day reality.

Thanks.

In GraphicConverter, the command, File/Edit file Info (IPTC), provides four fields into which the user can enter/save data: Headline, Caption, Title and Event.

Graphic Converter (V. 5.9) saves IPTC data as Adobe Photoshop Elements Info file.

Opened in TextEdit, this is what the output looks like:

x

In GraphicConverter, the command, File/Edit file Info (IPTC), provides four fields into which the user can enter/save data: Headline, Caption, Title and Event.

Graphic Converter (V. 5.9) saves IPTC data as Adobe Photoshop Elements Info file.

Since IPTC is designed for newspaper use (and has multi-language support), the IPTC part of EXIF seems like a reasonable (and in-place) device that PTW could use to automate the extraction of Title, Caption and Story text....???

fjd