Ampersand from Lightroom caption displayed incorrectly in Portfolio

[vogel421]

Operating System

1. macOS 13 Ventura

Hi. I am experimenting with using Portfolio as a convenient place to display my personal albums that I've made in Lightroom. Whether this is a Good Thing or not is still an open question, but I've stumbled across an interesting practical problem.

If I use the character "&", the ampersand, in a Lightroom caption it renders as expected in a Lightroom collection online. However, when I import the collection into Portfolio, the ampsersand is rendered as code: "&" (That is, in case the code extract didn't work, "ampersand, amp, semicolon".)

You can see examples here:

• This is from the Lightroom collection and you can see that the caption mentions Ezra & Gil with an ampersand;
• Sadly I can't send a direct URL for the Portfolio equivalent, but this is the collection, and the ninth image there is the one in question (you can see a number "11" table flag in the thumbnail) and there you see the ampersand replaced by code. But the source is exactly the same!

Obviously, this isn't the end of the world and I am not losing a lot of sleep over it! Nevertheless, the business in the photo does style itself "Ezra & Gil" and I'd prefer to use the right character. If I can't, and I have to change the caption to "Ezra and Gil", fine, no big problem. But I'd love to know what is going on here, is it a known issue, and is it avoidable?

Sorry if it's a silly or frequently asked question. Thanks for reading and thanks in advance for replies.

Best to all, Vogel

 

[clee01l]

It is an HTML issue. In HTML "amp;" is a special character set. I can't even include it in the reply

HTML uses characters like ampersand, greater than, less than, etc. in its syntax. So if someone wants to use those symbols in their web page, when they're putting the text in the HTML they need to put "&amp" for an ampersand, "&gt" for greater than, etc. When the browser displays the webpage, it understands to replace those with the proper characters.

The problem is that most webpages now aren't only HTML. There's PHP, Javascript, etc. and all these might not process the text in the same way. So a developer might put "&amp" in thinking that they need to do that, but they've made a mistake and that bit of text is actually not parsed in the same way HTML is so it never gets replaced.

I'm not sure what you need to put in your caption to insure that it displays properly. I think it is best to replace "&" with "and" to avoid the HTML code

 

[johnbeardy]

I can replicate the problem and it must be something in the scripting that displays the caption.

As a test, in LR I also renamed the collection to "AAA & BBB" and the ampersand was displayed correctly in Portfolio.

I doubt it'll be fixed quickly, even if one could contact the Portfolio team (assuming it still exists!). So I suggest working around it.

 

[Gnits]

I was also going to suggest the Double Quotes….

I absolutely abhor when software houses default to using comma separated variables (Csv) for sharing metadata… when tab delimited text files allow people to use any form of punctuation they wish within text fields. This is just sloppy text handling by the person who coded the segment.