Automatic CAPTION generation based on file name and keywords about where and what.

[bskyum]

Combined photographers must have spent a billion hours writing captions and finding info for these captions.

If there is software that can do this based on keywords, filename, GPS info and Wikipedia, then it would be a dream come true to apply it to Lightroom.
I have 37.000 images online with no captions due to lack of time - and not found by the search engines.

Looking forward to this.

Thanks.
Brian

 

[johnbeardy]

I'm not confident the caption could be automatically populated with enough precision to prevent lots of false positives in searches, let alone do so in sufficiently-correct English to make the photographer appear professional!
However, GPS data can be already be used (a Friedl plug-in, external apps) to reverse geocode and populate the IPTC location fields, which can then be parsed into searchable HTML.

Apart from the Wikipedia bit, you can handle some of this with my Search Replace Transfer plug-in. So you could copy from the IPTC fields into the caption, append the filename etc. It's a manual exercise though.

But in the end, I'd say no pain no gain. If you want good metadata for search engines, it's your responsibility to enter those captions properly - and Lightroom makes that relatively easy/efficient. I'd also wonder which way round things should be - your keywords->captions, or my preference of parsing captions->keywords.

John

 

[bskyum]

Thank you very much.
I do not have GPS cameras, so that possibility is not relevant - yet.

I know its hardly possible for a program to make an exact semantic description based on Filename and keywords alone. I meant based on this + the same keywords (or some of them) found in Wikipedia or Google map articles about the location or subject. If the software would find a sufficient percentage of my keywords and filename text in an article, it should then copy that article into the IPTC caption field - if that article is not copyrighted. Afterward the photographer or photo library manually checks if the chosen article is relevant or not (which it probably would be with 20-50 keywords. This would be a billion dollar time saver. (I ask only a modest million for the idea:nod

I wonder if your search and replace plugin also can be used to swop old images with newer improved versions of the same images, so that I dont have to redo all the metadata work - in batch.?
It should be possible somehow, if I put the new set of images in the same order as the old -in one grid view. Could also save month of work (8000 images), which I am doing now.

High regards from a dreamer

 

[johnbeardy]

Take a look at Keyword Master at http://photographers-toolbox.com/ . IIRC it looks up images online and grabs their keywords.Search Replace Transfer wouldn't help, but look up my Syncomatic which synchronises Library metadata and Develop adjustments (except the crop) between pairs of files whose names are identical (or have a suffix like -edit) but where the file types differ, or from the top item of a stack to the other stacked items.John

 

[bskyum]

Thanks.

Since Lightroom keyworder seem unable to import words from the filename. I have given my new scannings of same images much shorter file names, why they are not identical with the old ones. But it sounds like Synchromatic can do it, if the old and new are arranged in the same order in a stack - is this correctly understod? If so - BINGO!


I will check out both software.


Thanks a trillion

 

[johnbeardy]

Syncomatic works with 2 criteria - filenames which are identical (or with a consistent suffix/prefix) , or on images being stacked.

John