Problems with Captioning and Photoshop

Alex, some questions: what are you trying to caption your pictures for (i.e. Web publishing)? And, are you trying to caption them in batches or individually?

I’m not familiar with Photo Mechanic, but I’m sure you can do all your captioning in native PS, using layers and expanding your canvas, not to mention you’ll have more control over fonts, styles, etc., and you can still save them in TIFF format with all the layers included.

L

Luis, The captioning is a requirement from my agency. Information such as Photo date, City, Country, authorship, etc and search keywords which are very useful for cataloging . I normally do the captioning in batches and few images need individual captioning. This is driving me crazy when this information disappears and have to do it again. Gracias por tu ayuda

I faced similar problems with keywords. I’m no guru, but my general understanding is that there are two competing (neck-and-neck) statndards for metadata and that data in one standard can be invisible to or even get “disappeared” by programs using the other standard. PS uses xmp and I suspect Photo Mechanic uses IPTC. Most programs aren’t very transparent about telling you which kind of data they’re writing. The free viewer IrfanView at least lets you see IPTC data as IPTC data, which sometimes offers a clue. There are xmp <→ IPTC converters out there, but I’ve yet to see one for less than $100. If you stumble onto one, let me know.

Meanwhile, I find the Browser in PS very handy for metadata (captions, keywords, copyright, contact info). And both the xmp and IPTC standards can be read by databases and some web galleries. For instance, my PS-generated xmp keywords “magically” become categories at my photo archive: www.indonesiawild.com.

Djuna

Alex, now I understand as did Djuna with his advise. I use this for writing IPTC information (what you need) iWatermark It is very good, not only for IPTC info but also for watermarking your pictures. It is only 20 bucks and worth it.
As Djuna says, you can also use PS to write xmp information to files. You go to File>Info and enter all the information you need there. If you need to create a template for batch IPTC information on a whole folder, for example, you first create a new file in PS (no matter what size or anything as it will only contain the IPTC info you want).
2. Go to File>Info and write all the info you want
3. In the upper right corner of that window there is a button for a menu, click there.
4. Select Save Matadata Template and pick a name you’ll remember and/or apply to your current job.
5. Exit that window and go File>Save As and give a name to that file (you can save it as a JPG)
6. Once you have that Template made, it will available in the Bridge under Tools>Append Metadata or Tools>Replace Metadata. You can for example select a whole folder with pictures or a group therein and go to one of those two options and write or append new metadata to the group.

Hope this helps.

Luis

Follow up : If the picture is save in TIFF the captioning appears in Photo Mechanics and disappear in photoshop. If the picture is save in JPEG there is no problem with the captioning, all the information appears in Photoshop. I only have problems with TIFF formats files

Alex. I usually (not always) do my captioning before editing, or converting to TIFF. Have yet to have a problem. Might be something simple like not saving the new file info before resizing or something. Do you hold a license for photomechanic? They have been known to play some weird tricks that occur when moving images around that somehow effect folks using pirated copies.

Aside from that, the good folks at camerabits (photomechanic authors) recently opened up a forum for people to ask questions, and list desires for future versions. They are extremely helpful people over there. Kirk Baker’s attentiveness alone is worth the price of a yearly upgrade. I’d ask the question there.

http://forums.camerabits.com/

Use iView Media Pro for Asset management and metadata…

I think the problem is the way PM exports data to Photoshop. Which version of Photoshop are you using? Adobe changes the way Photoshop handle IPTC data in nearly every version of Photoshop. If you are using CS2 (and Bridge, the stand alone app that replaced File Browser) you can batch your captions, much as you do in Photo Mechanic. That is the good news. The bad news is that Bridge builds thumbnails much, much slower than PM, so if you are working on deadline it is a little annoying. If you are not on deadline, it takes just as long but is not as annoying. Camerabits has started a very helpful support forum you might want to click on over here: http://forums.camerabits.com/ to see if anyone can answer your question.
good luck,
jack

John, I have the same problem that Alex….but with Iview media pro.
I write all the caption on Iview and then just try to edit the pictures on PS, but disappear..!!
I HATE CAPTIONING???!?!?!?
(speally when you lost it)
thanks

John, I have the same problem that Alex….but with Iview media pro.
I write all the caption on Iview and then just try to edit the pictures on PS, but disappear..!!
I HATE CAPTIONING???!?!?!?
(speally when you lost it)
thanks

An update. If you are using Photo Mechanic you can set its caption handling properties in preferences. Specifically how it handles XMP and ITCP data and how PM handles that data differs among file types (I do not know why). I would mess around in preferences and see if you can fix the problem. Good luck. jack

Hola gente. Dave, you must select “sync annotations” in the Action menú before you close the aplication. Alex, if you don´t have to tilt in the crop you can crop with photomechanic and preserve the original. Maybe using the same software don´t lost the caption. Hope this help. Saludos

PS in CS2 contains both IPTC and xmp fields…can’t be much more help than that I’m afraid.

UPDATE.
Thank you all for your replies. I am testing Iview media Pro 3.0.2
In some TIFF files you can see the captioning , in most you CAN’T !!!!
If I recaption an image,this time using Iview, the captioning will appear only on Iview, it iwill disappear on Photoshop and Photo Mechanics.
I am going to try iWatermark.

For those interested in this issue.
I updated Photo Mechanics to the latest version . ALL the captioning was lost in the TIFF files.
The good news is that with this version the new captioning is save with no problem and can be read by Photoshop or Iview.
This is going to be a long weekend.
Again Thank you all.