Lightroom Caption Builder for Photojournalists, Sports Photographers and Stock Photographers

I’ve been working with John Beardsworth over at Lightroom Solutions (http://lightroomsolutions.com/) on a Caption Builder (When I say working with, I contacted him with my idea and he did all the programming and technical wizardry!).

I’ve been using this technique for years on PhotoMechanic (http://www.camerabits.com/) where I populate other fields which make up my caption and use a sort of code replacement to bring these to the main caption. This has quite a few benefits for me:

1. If I cock up a caption, which happens often, I can change that field and rebuild
2. It separates information into an easily understandable way (I’m crap with too much information so this technique thins it out to a simple “who, what, when, where…” which is great for press photography and general information input too)
3. It’s pretty satisfying having all my captions looking uniform.

Caption Builder showing the Lightroom Metadata Panel
Cambridge Sunset Swans, an iPhone photo I shot yesterday, turned out quite nice (not quite time to chuck out the SLRs)

Ok, so above is how I have Lightroom (LR) setup. The panel on the right is where I enter my metadata. I have a custom preset that fills the “Who/what/where/when” necessities and the copyright metadata never changes from picture to picture so is nicely hidden away.

Caption Builder showing the Lightroom Metadata Panel
This is John’s Search & Replace plugin Caption Builder panel

So this where my caption is concocted. The ingredients I use are the following:

In Lightroom using John’s Search & Replace plugin I use this code:

{headline} – Picture date {dow} {day} {monthname}, {year} ({city}, {stateProvince})
 
{title}
 
Photo credit should read: Jonathan Pow/jp@jonathanpow.com

In Photo Mechanic I use the following to get the same:

{headline} – Picture date {dow} {day} {monthname}, {year4} ({city}, {state})
 
{object}
 
Photo credit should read: Jonathan Pow/jp@jonathanpow.com

Using this with John’s Search & Replace plugin produces this result (pretty cool isn’t it?). The object/title bit isn’t always used, like in this photo, but is there if needed:

Swans on the River Cam in Cambridge at Sunset – Picture date Monday 09 December, 2013 (Cambridge, Cambridgeshire)
 

 
Photo credit should read: Jonathan Pow/jp@jonathanpow.com

Or, seeing as I like images here’s how it looks (below)

Caption Builder has done this… pretty cool huh?

It’s a real boon for me, as I suffer when there’s information overload, so keeping it simple really helps. Also keeping all information separate really helps speed things up if I need to update something (even my contact details).

Just for reference I use HEADLINE to describe all the images (as a collective set), TITLE/OBJECT to describe individual photos (who or what specific things are in it? That sort of thing) and although I don’t use this my caption itself I use JOB IDENTIFIER to easily locate an image when it’s on my archive (This one would be something like SUNSET_SWAN).

TRY the Caption builder on Search and Replace plugin here: http://lightroomsolutions.com/a-new-feature-for-my-search-and-replace-plugin/

DOWNLOAD my custom Lightroom Metadata panel here (5W&1H is who, what, why, where, when & how and one of the first things taught in journalism):

5W&1H preset from jonathanpow.com

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 10th, 2013 at 5:17 PM. It is filed under Photo Jobs Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.