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:
- If I cock up a caption, which happens often, I can change that field and rebuild
- 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)
- It’s pretty satisfying having all my captions looking uniform.

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.

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)

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
Clever! My partner Emma has recently started using Lightroom and loving it, but even as a ‘newbie’ to captioning, she’s found LR frustrating. She’s looking forward to trying your invention.