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How to get iPhoto captions into Smugmug
darryl
Registered Users Posts: 997 Major grins
Hi -- I was tellng a buddy about Smugmug shortly after I signed up. He liked the layout, but wanted to know if Smugmug could import the captions that his wife painstakingly entered into iPhoto.
I tried uploading an iPhoto album of my own that had captions, and alas, no luck....
So I was digging around these forums and found Baldy talking about IPTC keywords being accessible from the Search function, and there was the implication that IPTC metadata may also contain captions. Maybe, just maybe, the Smugmug uploader will take the IPTC captions and use them as captions on the site. Or maybe that's where Smugmug stores them when you create/edit them on the site.
I did a little Googling, and found that there's an AppleScript from Apple themselves that allows you to write iPhoto caption information into the IPTC metadata of an image. And you can do this for a multiple selection (batches!)
The AppleScript is called "Caption Buddy" and can be downloaded from the bottom of this page:
http://www.apple.com/applescript/iphoto/
So I quickly captioned a bunch of photos, then selected them all and ran
Caption Buddy. Command-6 seems like the right thing: "iPhoto Tags to
IPTC Tags". Chunk chunk chunk... Done.
Uploaded the album up to smugmug via the uploader, and voila!
Captions from iPhoto!
Of course, avoiding this extra step would be really nice for
less-technical folks. But this *might* be an acceptable workaround
for people with iPhoto Albums that have already done a lot of
captioning work.
I tried uploading an iPhoto album of my own that had captions, and alas, no luck....
So I was digging around these forums and found Baldy talking about IPTC keywords being accessible from the Search function, and there was the implication that IPTC metadata may also contain captions. Maybe, just maybe, the Smugmug uploader will take the IPTC captions and use them as captions on the site. Or maybe that's where Smugmug stores them when you create/edit them on the site.
I did a little Googling, and found that there's an AppleScript from Apple themselves that allows you to write iPhoto caption information into the IPTC metadata of an image. And you can do this for a multiple selection (batches!)
The AppleScript is called "Caption Buddy" and can be downloaded from the bottom of this page:
http://www.apple.com/applescript/iphoto/
So I quickly captioned a bunch of photos, then selected them all and ran
Caption Buddy. Command-6 seems like the right thing: "iPhoto Tags to
IPTC Tags". Chunk chunk chunk... Done.
Uploaded the album up to smugmug via the uploader, and voila!
Captions from iPhoto!
Of course, avoiding this extra step would be really nice for
less-technical folks. But this *might* be an acceptable workaround
for people with iPhoto Albums that have already done a lot of
captioning work.
0
Comments
So I used Caption Buddy to put captions into the images and then uploaded with the Mac uploader, but it doesn't seem to be working any more. Tonight all I get on SmugMug are filenames in the captions, not the titles.
Is anyone out there (reading this particular forum) still using iPhoto + Caption Buddy + Mac Uploader to (successfully) get captions from iPhoto to SmugMug?
I'm using iPhoto 4.0.3, Caption Buddy 1.0, and the SmugMug (Mac) Uploader 1.0, and my family is waiting for several months' worth of photos to be uploaded.
Of course, my REAL hope is that someone would fix the Mac uploader to get the captions directly out of the iPhoto albums so I don't have to bother with Caption Buddy...
Now that the XML API is out, how about Open-Sourcing the Mac Uploader as sample code so someone else might be able to improve it? :-)
--Steve
Hop to it, Ben
"The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over."-Hunter S.Thompson
I can also use "Read Tags from Image File" to confirm that the title tag is blank, and the caption tag is correct. But after uploading to SmugMug the title of the image is set to the filename.
I will also add that I originally created the SmugMug Gallery with "show filename if no caption" setting turned on, but I've since turned that off, deleted all images in the gallery, and re-uploaded the caption-only image but to no avail.
This DID work for me back in June. It seems like something broke somewhere along the way... :-(
--Steve
Strange, I upload photos with the smugmug uploader from iPhoto and it puts the captions in fine.
My problem is that iPhoto uses the filename as caption in the absence of a caption, so I get a caption on smugmug that I don't want.
Are you guys using the latest iPhoto? I think it's a change in iPhoto that allows the uploader to send captions along with the photos.
Don
hmmm...hang on a sec. Lemme check.
"The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over."-Hunter S.Thompson
Right. iPhoto 4.0.3. You can edit the caption (or have to, depending on how you look at it).
Even more interesting (imho) is that if you upload a file named blah.blah.jpg, the filename appears "blah blah".
Just so you don't think you get off scott-free here, Don. What's up with a zombie uploader icon staying in the doc? After uploading files successfully, it stays down there, but if you click on it, nothing happens, so you have to right-click quit, then fire it up again.
"The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over."-Hunter S.Thompson
No, it's not a zombie. It behaves like most of Apples apps. "Closing the window" != "Closing the application". Check your menubar on the top of the screen as you click on it, you'll notice that it changes to "smugmug uploader" and you have the normal menu options for it. Close it from there, and it closes the whole app. Plenty of Apple apps behave this way (in fact, it's the recommended method from Apple), so we do too.
Don
Ok, I've got iPhoto 4.0.3, and Smugmug Uploader 1.0 (btw, the download page still says it's version 0.99). I added a caption to an image, then uploaded the gallery, and no captions showed up in Smugmug.
Don -- are you saying that your photos captioned in iPhoto, without any additional steps (Caption Buddy, etc.), have their captions show up in Smugmug after using the uploader?
Because it definitely doesn't work that way for me. If it did, none these extra steps would be necessary. So can you please confirm that's *all* you did to get captions into Smugmug?
- I have an image with proper IPTC tags, as confirmed by both Caption Buddy and GraphicConverter.
- When uploaded from as part of a iPhoto gallery, something has changed in the OS X Uploader -> Smugmug connection wherein the IPTC data is *not* being properly parsed. Perhaps your cleaning up of the API broke something in the OS X Uploader?
- When uploaded as a standalone file (drag and drop with the OS X Uploader), the caption shows up fine.
Steve: If a gallery that you are uploading is all of one day, you can simply navigate to: ~/Pictures/iPhoto Library/2004/07/04 (for instance), and drag all of those JPGs to the Uploader, and the captions should show up correctly. Unfortunately, the uploader gets the ordering screwed up, so hopefully chronological will work and you can do a re-sort from the web UI.
Don: This sucks. We're not hallucinating. This really is broken. :{ The ordering thing is a pain too, in case your photos *aren't* alphabetically or chronologically organized or are from different sources that don't all have proper timestamps. One of the great things about uploading an iPhoto gallery is that it always came through *exactly* like it was on the Mac. (Again, this leads me to believe that the OS X uploader may have made some special calls to your API that may have been lost in the clean-up.)
Ok, first of all, there hasn't been a "clean up" of the API.
Secondly, you must be hallucinating, cuz I just uploaded a ton of photos using the uploader, and the captions come through fine.
Note that since we have a single caption field, we *ignore* the IPTC Captiobn field in preference of what iPhoto is telling us. So that might be why your IPTC Captions aren't showing up. If iPhoto wasn't giving us a caption, we'd use the IPTC.
iPhoto calls caption 'Title', but they're the same thing. Title your image in iPhoto, it works perfectly uploading to smugmug. If it doesn't, you may be using an old and/or broken iPhoto. The latest one works fine.
Don
OK, after looking at this more closely, I see the problem. I see in the iPhoto .attr files that it sticks the "title" field after something called "Caption". I guess what I am really after is the "Comments" field, which the .attr file seems to call "Annotation".
Look at how iPhoto treats the title field: The default value is the image filename. For Olympus camera owners, that is something of the form PA311234.jpg. iPhoto also has a "batch" command which lets you change the title of one or more images to your choice of "Empty", "Text" (with an optional number following it), "Roll Info", "Filename", or "Date/Time". I personally prefer to leave my titles set to the (default) Filename.
I also prefer to add sentance-long *comments* (or annotations, captions, whatever) to my images describing what the photo was about. To me this is more detail than I would ever put in the "Title" (which I think is intended to be a short field containing the filename, date/time, roll info, etc. -- see previous paragraph). In fact, the Title field in iPhoto is only one line tall and looks like it will hold only about four words total.
I have thousands of images, with (the default) filenames for titles, and lots of painfully added *comments* (anyone who has added comments in older, slower versions of iPhoto knows what I mean by "painfully added"). I'd like these comments to appear in my SmugMug galleries as captions, NOT the image titles.
If SmugMug's uploader is clever enough to find the "caption" in the .attr file, then it should also be able to easily find the "annotation" in the same file, and (if there really are people who prefer to upload the "title" rather than the "comments") just add a checkbox so we can choose one or the other.
The really annoying thing (as Darryl and I have painstakingly discovered) is that the "Caption Buddy" program that used to work last May/June no longer works. Well, it still works the same as it ever did, but it looks like iPhoto changed to now label the Title as a caption. That would explain why Caption Buddy's EXIF captions were previously used by SmugMug's uploader but no longer are (unless you manually drag images out of iPhoto and into the SmugMug uploader in which case the uploader has no .attr info to read but instead has to read the EXIF captions). Good thing that Caption Buddy includes takes iPhoto's "Comments" (rather than the "Title") for the EXIF "Caption" field. :-/
Anyway, it sounds like the simple workaround would be to add an option to the uploader to take the Comments rather than the Title.
[As an aside, is there any way to turn off all of the goofy animated smileys in the digitalgrin "reply to topic" page? They (or something) seem to really slow down Safari to the point where it can't even keep up with my typing in this reply field!]
Well, first off, Caption Buddy does not add EXIF captions, but rather IPTC Titles and Captions. EXIF has its own completely separate "Comment" field. As we discovered yesterday, Photoshop's "Caption" corresponds to the IPTC "Caption/Abstract" field.
Specs on IPTC Headers are here: http://www.iptc.org/IIM/
Anyways, I just tried using the Uploader with an old (2.0!) version of iPhoto, and got some weird results:
- When you initially drag or import a photo into iPhoto, it gets a Title of the filename, minus the extension, so IMG_12345
- With this ancient version of iPhoto (2.0), it looks like the Smugmug Uploader is looking at the wrong metadata, because even when I change the Title in iPhoto, it is still setting the caption to be IMG_12345
So yeah, part of the problem is that Apple apparently doesn't publish an official API for iPhoto anywhere, and they keep changing up the metadata format. And apparently the Smugmug Uploader is looking for it at a specific byte location in the .attr file, as opposed to a fieldname.
Don: Has the Caption field always been available in the API?
Everyone Else: Can you confirm that the iPhoto Title -> Smugmug Caption thing has always worked for you? Because I used the Uploader when I first joined (May 2004), and none of those albums have IMG_12345 as their captions. iPhoto was probably at 4.0.X since it had come out in January 2004.
Are you really entering captions in iPhoto's "title" field for all of your photos? I see your "caption test" gallery, where the first image has the filename as the caption, and the next two have "see dork" and "sucky sucky" (heh).
So it seems that you're content with two word (or very short) captions entered in the title field, which is all that the SmugMug uploader will pick up from iPhoto.
My wife and I, on the other hand, enter much longer image descriptions in the Comments field (click the little "i" icon and watch the expandable comments section open up).
What we're asking for is a checkbox in the uploader that allows the user to select whether they want to upload iPhoto's titles, or iPhoto's captions. Maybe you could have a popup instead that has other options, like "whatever is not blank" (meaning comments, but if none, then title, and if none, then EXIF/IPTC/whatever).
Is there any chance of doing this?
Since the API is now public, how about posting the source to the uploader so someone else can fix (e.g. "improve") it if you don't have any plans to?
--Steve
Hey there!
If you've regularly used the iPhoto to manage your photos (and upload them to Smugmug using their Aqua Uploader) prior to August (iPhoto 4.0.3), then can you do me a favor?
Look at albums between May and August. See if the Title field for your photos have anything in them. I'm betting they'll contain the filename of the photo, like IMG_12345.
Now, can you go to the corresponding Smugmug Album and see if those Titles match up with what you've got in iPhoto? In theory, all of your albums from May-Aug *should* have captions of IMG_12345, etc.
But y'see, mine don't.
My contention is that prior to iPhoto 4.0.3, the Uploader was *broken* with regards to mapping iPhoto Titles -> Smugmug Captions. And that the re-arrangement of the data in the iPhoto .attr files "fixed" this bug.
In fact, the whole reason I started this thread (back in May) is because it appeared that iPhoto Comments -> Smugmug Caption was broken. If I had noticed that Title was being converted to Caption, we would have had to deal with this back then.
A former sports shooter
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Darryl said there's a short Title field in iPhoto and it would be preferable to import the longer comments field instead. Is everyone in agreement? If not, do we need something in the UI that lets you choose which to import into our caption field?
Thanks,
Baldy
I'm not opposed to the title field myself. Maybe a better understanding on my part is needed. I know in Photoshop's File Browser I can have it set metadata, copyright notices, and add keywords. This is really cool, and I'm thinking about switching to File Broswer for my needs. However, having an uploader direct from iPhoto albums is very, very nice to have.
So here is the "education" I need for me to answer your question, Baldy. If I use PS's File Broswer to set keywords in the metadata of the JPG file, does Smugmug use that information at all? Does iPhoto? What if I use File Browser to set my keywords and such, import into iPhoto, stuff into an album, and upload from there?
I have yet to determine if I will upgrade to iPhoto 5 or not. I'm starting to dislike Apple's filing system, just like others do.
In the end, I think what helps everyone out is an easy way to upload images to Smugmug galleries and have it bring along captions and keywords so that we don't have to add it later.
Does iPhoto 5 make your life any easier at Smugmug by modifying JPG metadata in a more industry accepted manner? I guess that would be the best solution, if Apple helped your cause, no?
A former sports shooter
Follow me at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bjurasz/
My Etsy store: https://www.etsy.com/shop/mercphoto?ref=hdr_shop_menu
--Steve
"This is the title and it must be limited to only a few characters because some customers have complained, but it seems to be pretty long to me."
Since the title field is the most accessible and the one that is displayed below your photos with iPhoto, it seems like it should definitely be the default. It sounds like the right solution is to provide the option with a checkbox.
So I'm not sure what I want to do, then. I'm in the midst of changing my workflow, trying to remove iPhoto as much as possible. I'd like it to be used only for convenient uploading to Smugmug, rather than as a previewing/sorting/tagging tool. Maybe I will keep it for that after all.
If I were to use Photoshop to put in Keyword into the JPG, plus have it rename my files to something more meaningful than "_MG_0403.JPG", then import to iPhoto to arrange into albums, then upload to Smugmug, this is what I think will happen:
1) iPhoto will default the title to the filename
2) Smugmug will use the title for the caption
3) Smugmug will use the PS keywords for Smugmug keywords
If this thinking is correct then I'm quite happy with that. What I want to do is use keywords for user searches. I'll take all my kart racing photos and have Photoshop add a "kart" keyword. I'll then put in a keyword for the number of the kart in the photo. Then users can search for pictures of his kart number.
Will this work? Or would it be better to have the kart number in the caption as well?
A former sports shooter
Follow me at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bjurasz/
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The Comments field can be stretched so you can actually see and edit your long comments. I don't believe the title field will show any more than a single line of text (and I believe it's limited to however wide that side-pane of the iPhoto window is).
That would be awesome, thanks. Please also make the setting "sticky" -- that is, once I've checked the box, it should always be checked for subsequent uploads.
--Steve
We'd love to do the right thing and I hope adding this option doesn't confuse a whole lot more people than it helps.
The only caveat is that upon upload, we compare the filename to the Caption. If they're identical, we discard the Caption as being iPhoto's default caption.
The filename will still get properly stripped and added to the search index, so people can find your photos, and you can still use "display filenames" in your gallery setting to show them instead of the Caption. So I think everything you want to occur will actually occur, just not in precisely the way you described.
Don
I don't understand why it shouldn't be possible to have both Comment *and* Title from iPhoto displayed? It seems natural to have a short, one to three word title - displays well in thumb views, etc. Then, fill in the comments field with a paragraph or so about the image. I use that to tell a story with my albums. (The journal view on smugmug would be *perfect* for this!!)
From what I gather on this thread, putting the Comment paragraph into the Title field in iPhoto is the only way currently to have my iPhoto comments show up on smugmug albums. This, unfortunately, would make composing them an absolute chore in iPhoto, since you can only ever see one line of Title at a time.
Smugmug seems like a *great* service, and definitely worth paying for, but iPhoto is still my catalogging program of choice, and my online albums wouldn't be the same without their comments...
Has anyone found a workaround?
I wish the uploader could be fixed to upload the comments using the built-in iPhoto album selector, but so far it doesn't appear to be a priority for the SmugMug folks. I'd be much more irritated by this if the drag-and-drop didn't work, but at least we have that.
Used the uploader in the Album mode, and bah, no captions. I forgot about this annoyance. What really annoys me is that I swear that this worked when I first joined about a year ago.
Don says that the OS X Uploader has always used iPhoto Titles for Smugmug Captions. But I found that if you used Caption Buddy to write the Comments to the IPTC Caption field of each file, the IPTC Caption would take precedence over the iPhoto Title.
I detailed this procedure in a post shortly after I joined Smugmug: http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=1351
Sometime around the API rollout, as well as a new version of iPhoto, the iPhoto Title began to take precedence over the IPTC Caption.
What I would be happy with is yeah, a checkbox or preference in the new Uploader (2.0 is due out when...?) to select Title or Comments mapping.
Or I suppose I could use the web uploader, although my experience with non-iPhoto upload methods have been that it doesn't get the date sorting right. (I like my photos to be sorted by IPTC date of when they were shot, not when I uploaded them to my computer or cropped them, etc.)
Anyways, enough geeking out. We've got a plane to catch to Maui!
--Darryl
I whole-heartedly second timpics suggestion. iPhoto titles are great for thumbnail views, and comments (or captions or annotations or ...) are much better for telling a story. Until Apple helps iPhoto users out of metadata hell by implementing built-in IPTC support, PLEASE revise the uploader to offer the choice of uploading iPhoto titles, comments or both. I am waiting for smugmug to develop an uploader with this capability before I become a paying customer.
Also, please excuse the newbie question, but does smugmug import iPhoto keywords? I actually use keywords for sorting/finding images far more often then titles or comments.
On a related note, has anyone tried
PictureSync? The website claims it can upload images with annotations (from iPhoto or iView Media Pro or the finder) to a variety of photo-hosting sites, including smugmug. (I don't work for them, own stock, blah, blah.) I'd like to know if it works before deciding whether to bother with a free smugmug trial. Alas, the free download does NOT upload annotations.
Unfortunately (as far as I am aware, someone correct me if I happen to be wrong), we do not import Keywords and populate the keywords section. Again, this is largely due to the goofy proprietary way iPhoto handles things like captions and keywords instead of using the international standard IPTC data. I highly recommend firing Apple an email suggesting this, as hopefully they will come around on this issue.
I tried PictureSync when they first released it, but that was back before it had a paid version (that I recall) or the "annotations". Hopefully someone here has used it so they can weigh in on it. I don't know if they still do it, but they used to automatically resize the images upon uploading. You could disable that in the Account Settings portion of the uploader, just to save you some looking around.
Sorry, I wish I had a more authoritative answer on that one. Perhaps tomorrow when I get into the office I will pick up a copy and give it a shot.
The first time I tried PictureSync, I couldn't get it to upload anything at all. I just tried it again, and it informed me there was an update available, so I downloaded that and it _seems_ to be working. And, miracle of miracles, it seems to be able to locate and upload the iPhoto comments JUST FINE.
So once again, I have to ask: Why in the heck can't the SmugMug uploader also upload iPhoto comments? Must we really buy a separate program that does far more than we need, just to be able to upload iPhoto comments to SmugMug?
Someone mentioned that they weren't going to join SmugMug until the SmugMug uploader worked correctly. I actually chose the other option -- I put my money where my mouth was: I've been a paying customer for over a year (meaning I've already renewed for my second year) AND I continue to tell others what a great site and service it is. I only ask that in return, SmugMug consider fixing their broken iPhoto uploader.
I swear that the uploader used to allow me to drag in pictures from iPhoto (even if less convenient than simply selecting an existing album) and it would get the comments. In addition, the Caption Buddy script used to work (to write comments into the IPTC tags and then upload with the SmugMug uploader. However, I have failed at getting either of these methods to work while trying to simply upload some vacation pictures to share with friends and family before I get back home. Unfortunately, I've lost the better part of a few hours of my precious vacation time, dorking around trying to get my captions to upload along with my pictures.
After I finally gave up and waited for all of my pictures to upload captionless, I decided to try PictureSync one more time. Now that it seems to work I'm re-uploading my pictures with captions. I guess that means PictureSync is worth the money, but given that SmugMug's own uploader is what's broken here. Regardless of what iPhoto does and how it stores captions (about which I as a user honestly couldn't care less), the captions clearly ARE retrievable by both CaptionBuddy and PictureSync. So, as a paying SmugMug customer, I blame SmugMug's broken uploader, not iPhoto.
PLEASE just fix the Mac uploader, so other users (who likely bought a Mac because everything else "just works") who aren't fortunate enough to track down and figure out this PictureSync app will still have an option to upload captions from iPhoto!!