Captions not being picked up during upload

BKUSFL

Hi, I'm a new customer so today was my first day on SmugMug. I added captions to my photos (on my computer) and then I uploaded the photos using "Publish on SmugMug". I then checked the photos to see that everything looked as it should, and I noticed that my camera info was missing from each photo. I knew that the photos contained this information so I ran a test and used SmugMug's drag-and-drop method to upload some of the same photos. When I checked them in my gallery I found that they contained the camera info (:clap) but they did not have captions!

I ran a couple more tests to see if I could determine why the captions were missing, and what I found was that a caption is displayed on a drag-drop photo only when the text exists within the xmp/iptc Description field. If the text is not in that field, and instead is in the Caption/Title field, drag-drop doesn't detect it (though "Publish on SmugMug" somehow does detect it).

Just in case the xmp/iptc field names I'm using aren't "official", it might help you to know where I got them:
Caption: Windows Live Photo Gallery's caption field
Title: Nikon NX's title field
Description: Nikon NX's description field (the text I added to this field appeared in SM as the caption when I uploaded using drag-drop)

So, why am I pointing this out? Because it appears as if the drag-drop process isn't using the correct field from which to obtain captions.

Here are a couple of links for photos I uploaded during the test. Actually, it's the same photo uploaded twice, using drag-drop both times. The difference between the two is that when I uploaded photo1 my caption text existed only within the caption/title field, and when I uploaded photo2 the text existed within the description field.

Photo1
Photo2

I hope that this is enough info for you to go on, but if not I'll be glad to provide whatever you need.


Thanks,
Brent

Andy

Hi Brent, if you put your caption in the IPTC Description field, we'll use it automatically

Welcome!

BKUSFL

Andy wrote:

Hi Brent, if you put your caption in the IPTC Description field, we'll use it automatically

Welcome!

Hi Andy,
Yes, putting the text into the Description field is how I got the caption to appear in SM. But this seems to be an odd place for SM to be collecting the caption from! Shouldn't the caption be collected from the caption/title field (like "Publish on SmugMug" does)?

If SM isn't going to support using the Caption/Title field, then could you please add something to SM's help info? And can you accept this post as a new-feature request, or do I need to submit the request using another method?



Brent

richW

Brent, I'll take a look at this for you. ( I'll need to track down my Windows live log in )

Thinking it could be the information is being added to Windows Live xmp sidecar file and Omar's plug-in is reading it, where as our uploader isn't.

I'm not sure how Windows Live works or where they add the information.
I will search out the details and pass them over to our engineers for you.

BKUSFL

richW wrote:

Brent, I'll take a look at this for you. ( I'll need to track down my Windows live log in )

Thinking it could be the information is being added to Windows Live xmp sidecar file and Omar's plug-in is reading it, where as our uploader isn't.

I'm not sure how Windows Live works or where they add the information.
I will search out the details and pass them over to our engineers for you.

Hi richW,
This really isn't something that's isolated, or related, to Windows Live Photo Gallery. I probably confused the issue by describing how I came across the issue, which involved WLPG, instead of just jumping in and saying "Hey, why does SM's photo upload process pick up the caption from the xmp/iptc Description field instead of the Caption field?". SM's upload process operates this way regardless of whether I drag photos from WLPG or Nikon's ViewNX.

For now I'm circumventing the issue by putting caption-text in both fields. If you're wondering why I don't just use the Description field, it's because SM isn't the only place I view my photos, and ALL other viewing methods display the caption from the Caption field (who would've thought? ;-).


Thanks,
Brent

Andy

"Publish on SmugMug" is from which app, please?

Dan7312

As far as I can tell PS doesn't show a "Caption" IPTC field in the metadata for an image, but it does show a "Description" and the IPTC specification lists a Description field, but not a Caption field. The IPTC spec' does mention a legacy Caption field that was not made part of the IPTC core schema, that is the stuff that goes in the XMP data.

So it looks like Caption was part of the original IPTC Information Interchange Model that made it into XMP as the Description. So maybe this is just the result of colliding spec's???

Here are some details from poking around:

I open a jpeg in PS and look at the IPTC metadata and there is no Caption field, only a Description field, and the contents of that field is displayed on SmugMug as the caption.

A quick look on the IPTC site http://www.iptc.org/std/photometadata/specification/IPTC-PhotoMetadata%28200907%29_1.pdf doesn't list a Caption field, but it does list a Description field and the help for that Description field says:

Enter a "caption" describing the who, what, and why of what is happening in this image,
this might include names of people, and/or their role in the action that is taking place.

The same spec on page 27 also shows a mapping from legacy IIM:Caption to XMP Description.

mbrady

I ran into problems a year or two ago (the messages are probably still here on dgrin somewhere) where keywords added by Windows Live Photo Gallery were not imported by Smugmug. They store files as XMP data attached to the file itself (no extra side-car file). Smugmug ignores those (unless something has changed since then). However if you use the Smugmug plug-in for Windows Live Photo gallery, then the keywords DO appear on Smugmug. But uploading the same exact photo through the regular uploader does not get the keywords.

Which is a shame because Windows Live Photo Gallery is actually quite good at dealing with keywords, but I've had to abandon it because I lose all my keywords if I don't use the Smugmug plug-in to upload the photos.

BKUSFL

Dan7312 wrote:

As far as I can tell PS doesn't show a "Caption" IPTC field in the metadata for an image, but it does show a "Description" and the IPTC specification lists a Description field, but not a Caption field. The IPTC spec' does mention a legacy Caption field that was not made part of the IPTC core schema, that is the stuff that goes in the XMP data.

So it looks like Caption was part of the original IPTC Information Interchange Model that made it into XMP as the Description. So maybe this is just the result of colliding spec's???

Here are some details from poking around:

I open a jpeg in PS and look at the IPTC metadata and there is no Caption field, only a Description field, and the contents of that field is displayed on SmugMug as the caption.

A quick look on the IPTC site http://www.iptc.org/std/photometadata/specification/IPTC-PhotoMetadata%28200907%29_1.pdf doesn't list a Caption field, but it does list a Description field and the help for that Description field says:

Enter a "caption" describing the who, what, and why of what is happening in this image,
this might include names of people, and/or their role in the action that is taking place.

The same spec on page 27 also shows a mapping from legacy IIM:Caption to XMP Description.

Dan, wow, it looks as if you've answered the question about why SM gets the "caption" from the Description field. Good info, thank you!

Good for SmugMug for developing based on the newest standard, but bad for customers because there's no backward compatibility with other products that still use the old standard (WLPG and Nikon, though Nikon does have fields from both standards). SmugMug has an opportunity here to make their upload process more robust by having it look for text in the old Caption field when the Description field is empty. This could even be improved upon by having the process warn users when the old Caption field is used. This warning would allow users to know that they should go copy the Caption text into the Description field.


Brent

BKUSFL

mbrady wrote:

I ran into problems a year or two ago (the messages are probably still here on dgrin somewhere) where keywords added by Windows Live Photo Gallery were not imported by Smugmug. They store files as XMP data attached to the file itself (no extra side-car file). Smugmug ignores those (unless something has changed since then). However if you use the Smugmug plug-in for Windows Live Photo gallery, then the keywords DO appear on Smugmug. But uploading the same exact photo through the regular uploader does not get the keywords.

Which is a shame because Windows Live Photo Gallery is actually quite good at dealing with keywords, but I've had to abandon it because I lose all my keywords if I don't use the Smugmug plug-in to upload the photos.

The good news is that this is no longer an issue. The bad news is that if you use WLPG to add captions, which is what I was doing, then you'll run into the issue I've described above because apparently WLPG hasn't caught up to the newest standard that puts the caption into the Description field. Furthermore, "Publish to SmugMug", which is the WLPG plugin for uploading to SmugMug, doesn't pick up the camera data (ie., type of camera, exposure settings, etc.).

So my use of WLPG is relegated to being a photo finder, a role that it performs very well, much better than Nikon's software. I love how I can click on a folder and see all photos not only in that folder but also in all sub-folders, and how I can click on a keyword and pull together ALL photos (in all folders) that contain that keyword. Neither of these two great features are available from Nikon.

If SmugMug were to develop their upload process to provide these features, then I would no longer need to use a separate product (WLPG) to locate the pictures that I want to upload into specfic galleries. :ivar



Brent



Update: I discovered that "Publish to SmugMug" was not at fault for the missing camera data. WLPG has an option setting that controls the details that WLPG includes when photos are published, and the Camera Information option was not enabled.

mightor

@bkusfl - captions are the achilles hell of WLPG. Although Microsoft has done a good job of conforming to the new standard of XMP metadata elsewhere in the product, for some bizarre reason, the caption field in WLPG actually fills the "Title" field of the XMP standard. I suspect this is because Flickr reads the title field as the caption, and Microsoft wanted WLPG to play nice with flickr. The title field is a short, around 60 character field, I believe. The description field, which should have been used for the caption, actually allows something like 2000 characters.

As you mentioned, if you use Omar Shahine's Publish on Smugmug plugin for WLPG, the caption field appears in the correct place on Smugmug. I reckon this is because Mr. Shahine mapped it that way, being a very smart programmer, and a very nice dude. He corrected the WLPG team mistake in mis-mapping the field. Smugmug, although using the earlier IPTC-IIM standard, is correct in reading the description field as the caption. It's M-soft that should correct this error in their otherwise very standards friendly software.