Library module method for adding info to museum photos

[Newmarket2]

Lightroom Version Number

classic 7.5

Operating System

1. Windows 10

When in museums that allow photography, I take pics of the art and then the info plaque.
When updating my library, I use the plaque image to type the info into fields of the image itself.
Is there an OCR utility/applicaiton that could take a jpeg and render it to text?
I think that could save me a lot of time

 

[Newmarket2]

TopOCR (for W10) works quite well. The demo is free but you can't copy the resulting text.

So, updating my issue:

to those who enter artist, title, and other information in metadata....
which md fields do you use for which?
Yes, at some level it doesn't matter as long as I'm consistent, but I suspect that some who use it a lot will have an opinion and some advice.
Thanks!

 

[LouieSherwin]

Hi Michael,

The IPTC Extension fields has an "Artworks or Objects" section. That's where I would put that info. You could also use something like John Beardsworth Big Note if you just wanted free form entry.

Neither of these provide searchable fields in the Filter bar but are searchable using a text search.

-louie

 

[Newmarket2]

Louie,
Thanks! I missed that completely. [incorrectly assuming that all IPTC fields were in the "EXIF and IPTC" panel.
But, I do need to be able to search and am a bit unclear on your comment about text search....

What am I searching? using what? file explorer? or is there a text search in LR that I was unaware of?

 

[Hal P Anderson]

I'm pretty sure Louie was referring to this feature of the Filter Bar in Grid View:

 

[Newmarket2]

Hal, I think you're right.
I've been looking at it forever and because I never used it...it was invisible.

 

[Newmarket2]

Being able to search for title and artist could be an important consideration down the line.
And, because I'm not currently using some of the LR default Metadata fields; and because fields like "Title" and "Caption" are searchable fields, I'm thinking I might continue to use those rather than the IPTC extension fields that are specifically for Artworks.

Am I missing something that I'll be sorry about in the future?

 

[Kirby Krieger]

Am I missing something that I'll be sorry about in the future?

I catalog _photographs_ as art, as well as photographs of _artworks-that-are-not-photographs_. I suggest that you start with a clear distinction between title and caption (and author and copyright) of the _photo_ and those similar-by-name metadata of the _artwork_.

All metadata fields are searchable. Offhand, I like the suggestion of using John Beardsworth's Big Note, but rather than "free-form" text entry I would create a boilerplate something like:
ArtistName:
WorkName:
WorkDate:
Note:

(where "" is a searchable character {there are many of these }) and assign it to a text-substitution utility (OS's have these built-in) and apply it for each Photo (Lightroom's term for records in the database) that is of an artwork.

This is one of the reasons I have yet to move some of those catalogs from Aperture , which allowed for custom metadata fields and included an in-built spreadsheet-like data view.

 

[LouieSherwin]

Yes I was referring to the text search in the Grid view.

One advantage of using the IPTC Extensions is that the information can be imbedded into any exported derivatives whereas the information in Big Note is only available from within Lightroom.

-louie