how to download photos with title and captions?

suisekiart

I would like to download the photos in a gallery onto my windows pc and have the titles & captions I so lovingly put in come along with them. But it doesn't happen. Any suggestions?

denisegoldberg

suisekiart wrote: »

I would like to download the photos in a gallery onto my windows pc and have the titles & captions I so lovingly put in come along with them. But it doesn't happen. Any suggestions?

I'm not aware of a way to download photos from smugmug that will include your titles and captions.

There is a very old feature request on SmugMug's feature request page asking for this - http://feedback.smugmug.com/forums/17723-smugmug/suggestions/2284992-enable-downloading-captions.

For now I'd recommend that you change your process - keyword, caption, and title your photos before uploading them to SmugMug. That's what I changed to, using Lightroom I always assign keywords and sometimes assign title and caption. Those words are used in SmugMug when I upload the photos. That way the information stays with the photo.

--- Denise

jh4wvu

suisekiart wrote: »

I would like to download the photos in a gallery onto my windows pc and have the titles & captions I so lovingly put in come along with them. But it doesn't happen. Any suggestions?

Check out Smug Syncback. It's a Lightroom plugin that will sync any photo titles and captions edited on SmugMug back into Lightroom.

http://www.markuskvist.se/LightroomPlugins/SmugSyncback

Other plugin and options are listed at http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/84267-what-third-party-uploaders-downloads-migration-tools-and-utilities-are-available-

leftquark

The Official SmugMug Lightroom Publish Plugin will also do this.

agallia

denisegoldberg wrote: »

I'm not aware of a way to download photos from smugmug that will include your titles and captions...For now I'd recommend that you change your process - keyword, caption, and title your photos before uploading them to SmugMug. That's what I changed to, using Lightroom I always assign keywords and sometimes assign title and caption. Those words are used in SmugMug when I upload the photos. That way the information stays with the photo.

--- Denise

Good info and reminder, Denise.

agallia

leftquark wrote: »

The Official SmugMug Lightroom Publish Plugin will also do this.

Good to know this.

Ferguson

leftquark wrote: »

The Official SmugMug Lightroom Publish Plugin will also do this.

Kind of sort of...just to hopefully save people who might read this later a bit of confusion....

The photo image is only updated if it had the caption and titles added at the time the image was uploaded. If you add titles and captions then upload again, the plugin is very smart and helpful -- it just uploads the data, and not the image. So if you download the image, they are not there.

If you caption photos and want them in the downloaded-from-smugmug image, you have to do so before publishing, or mark them for republish.

I very much like how this works, as I can make keyword or other simple metadata changes, and publish en mass to Smugmug very quickly (as no image data goes up). Very efficient of bandwidth, what might otherwise take hours takes seconds.

But it is confusing if people then download the images later.

Lille Ulven

Not quite, Ferguson. Because in the settings of the plugin you can cross off for Metadata Trigger (in Republishing) which Metadata you want to trigger the selection for putting those photos up into the Modified view. These include Title and Caption as well as Keyword and a few more. Still you would have to go through your galleries from time to time to find those that are actually marked as modified to re-publish them. But at least you don't have to go through every file afterwards and figure out where you changed a Keyword by hand.

Ferguson

Lille Ulven wrote: »

Not quite, Ferguson. Because in the settings of the plugin you can cross off for Metadata Trigger (in Republishing) which Metadata you want to trigger the selection for putting those photos up into the Modified view. These include Title and Caption as well as Keyword and a few more. Still you would have to go through your galleries from time to time to find those that are actually marked as modified to re-publish them. But at least you don't have to go through every file afterwards and figure out where you changed a Keyword by hand.

I don't think I understand you.

Let's start with the assumption that ALL metadata is checked to cause a republish (that is what I have).

Now go into a photo which has been published and is up to date, and change something, let's say the caption.

The image is marked automatically for republish. Now publish that collection.

The result is that the caption is sent to smugmug and associated with the image, but the image itself is not sent. If you look ON smugmug at that image, you see the new caption. If you download that image, the caption is not in the image you download. Much as though you went to Smugmug and made the change there.

Now... go back to that image, and manually mark to republish. Then publish. The image itself is sent to smugmug, this time with the caption in the IPTC data.

As a different scenario, if you changed both the caption and the development settings, the image is marked for republish including to regenerate the image data, both are sent, and the caption will be in the image you later download as well as on smugmug.

At least that's what happens when I try it; this is all inferance from experimentation not documentation, so maybe I am wrong. Are you seeing different behavior?

Lille Ulven

Ferguson - you missed a tiny but very important step in your description, that's why your keyword update did not get transferred:
After changing your metadata in Lightroom you have to choose Metadata -> Save Metadata to File and when that is done you can continue with the republishing. Sounds crazy, but that is actually what is doing the trick for me when I change my keywords and want to download my files late again from Smugmug.

Unfortunately changing the title or caption in Smugmug I can synchronize as much as I want it won't get transferred to Lightroom...

Ferguson

Lille Ulven wrote: »

Ferguson - you missed a tiny but very important step in your description, that's why your keyword update did not get transferred:
After changing your metadata in Lightroom you have to choose Metadata -> Save Metadata to File and when that is done you can continue with the republishing. Sounds crazy, but that is actually what is doing the trick for me when I change my keywords and want to download my files late again from Smugmug.

Unfortunately changing the title or caption in Smugmug I can synchronize as much as I want it won't get transferred to Lightroom...

I think you are mistaken. At first I thought it was different for JPG's, but that does not seem to be the case.

First, to be sure we are the same, under the republishing section of the plugin setup, I have all boxes checked.

Then I did this:

1) Started with a JPG and NEF (Nikon raw) file, with no title on either one.
2) Published to smugmug (they were not before) in a test gallery
3) Went to Smugmug, and found each, and downloaded them

Neither one had a title -- well, of course not.

4) Added "New Title" to each one of these in Lightroom
5) Observed that both had been marked for republish automatically
6) Published the gallrey
7) Downloaded them.

Neither one had a title in the downloaded file (they both had a title showing on Smugmug)

8) Went back and for both images changed titles again (to distinguish), this marked for republish
9) Did a write metadata of both photos
10) Published the gallery
11) Downloaded them.

Neither one had the title in the download file (they both had the new title on Smugmug)

12) Went back and for both images right clicked and "Mark for republish"
13) Published the gallery
14) Downloaded them.

Both files now had the title in the downloaded file.

What happened is consistent with what I said -- unless the develop settings (specifically the checksum it builds from them), Smugmug/Lightroom does not automatically resend the image itself, only metadata. It only sent the image in steps #2 and #13 above, in steps #6, #10 it sent just metadata.

If I had changed either image's develop settings (let's say a new crop) it would have resent the image as well then also.

Interestingly enough, the "File name" I send to Smugmug is built from the title. Changing the title changes the file name on Smugmug -- except it doesn't, unless the image is resent. The FileName on Smugmug is only recorded when the file itself is sent; for some reason it does not consider that the same sort of metadata. I notice this because in the downloads all came down with a blank name until after step 12.

Again, I am doing this by inference and experimentation, not some knowledge of the code, but I have experimented quite a bit to make sure I understood. Please by all means do experiment, carefully, and see what you get. The key to observing this is whenever you make changes it must not affect how Lightroom thinks it should export the file (i.e. crops, develop settings of any kind).

Lille Ulven

Ferguson actually you are right, it is not working for captions or titles unless one marks the photos as to republish as you said. My seemingly working test was for keywords. I also noticed that the filename change that I have implemented in my export does not get transferred unless I mark the photo for re-publishment. My file names are set up to take the captions into consideration... and well keywords cannot be taken into the filenames in Lightroom, at least not as far as I know.
So this makes me wonder if the changes that are transferred to Smugmug (caption, title, date-fields, geo data ...) are only added to the photo in Smugmug if the photo is marked for re-publishment and is than republished as well, possibly because the filename might have to change but there is some sort of condition build into the plugin that prevents this from happening unless re-publishment was chosen from the context menu.
Not that it makes too much sense... I start wondering though if the error is somewhat related to the one fixed here - back then they were left unchanged, now they get changed but not "deep enough"

Ferguson

Lille Ulven wrote: »

Not that it makes too much sense... I start wondering though if the error is somewhat related to the one fixed here - back then they were left unchanged, now they get changed but not "deep enough"

It's always dangerous to guess the motivations/designs based on the results.....

I think it is also more of a lightroom issue than a smugmug issue, in a sense. Or a shared issue. Lightroom, internally, keeps separate track of what changes with checksums, so you can quickly compare if the develop-oriented data now matches something at a point older in time by just stashing that checksum and comparing.

I think Smugmug just rides on top of all this, and when the image data (i.e. develop settings) checksum changes, a publish pushes the image; if only the metadata changes it only pushes the metadata.

This saves a ton of bandwidth. Changing a few hundred photo's keywords can upload a few K, instead of a few gigabytes. Huge benefit.

Filename is the one that I believe should be different. Smugmug will not accept a new filename (which after all should be just data) unless you also upload the image again. It's really easy to change filenames in the export naming section, as you appear to I also make these dependent on title or caption plus some other stuff. So change a caption, change a filename -- smugmug will happily update the caption with a metadata-only upload, but not the file name. Which means the downloaded file actually comes down with the old name also.

One thing I haven't pursued is how all this interacts with synchronization. If I (for example) deleted photos on smugmug, does the file name being out of sync confuses the sync process? So I just do everything in LR not on SM (except for about 3 things I can't do -- customizing HTML (of course), reordering the order of galleries in a folder, and... actually maybe just 2, as I used to choose the gallery featured photo but I can do that now in LR).

But (and the reason I chimed into this topic), all this becomes very confusing if one is looking at files downloaded from Smugmug, as opposed to looking at images ON smugmug. Because it is very easy to have these images not have been updated, and not realize it.

So imagine you did something like this -- uploaded a set of images quickly, then go back and add all the captions. While you are at it, add your copyright information. Publish, and everything looks right.

Now you let Smugmug build a zip file and tell your customer they can download the images. Guess what -- those images don't have your copyright in them or anything else you added after the first publish.

So I can see why this is so-- it makes very good efficiency sense. But it is a rather obscure hole in your workflow if you are not aware of it.

Lille Ulven

Well for the copyright information in the exifs there is a simple solution - use a preset and have that added when you import the photos into Lightroom.

I don't think what you describe as a possible mess up with the filenames when you delete photos from Smugmug causes any problems in the sync process as you would anyway only delete photos that are in that smug mug plugin section.
But what gives you quite a headache is when you rename your files in Lightroom outside the Plugin and than start a re-sync. There the better way seems to be to rename those in your Smugmug galleries from the plugin first than run the re-publishing and after that you're free to rename all the other files in Lightroom

What I have seen lately is that when you have smart-galleries you will have to go to the whole syncing for those files again to match them with their "grand-parents" (parents would be the ones in the gallery they are taken from). And you can actually mark them for delete in the Plugin but because they are smart galleries and still obey to the rules you have set for that gallery you won't get that deletion processed (unless you go back into smug mug, take the whole smart gallery down, re-sync lightroom and set your smart gallery back up again).

I guess these ones could go into some bug list (which I haven't found last night) and hopefully be either fixed or explained.

Ferguson

Lille Ulven wrote: »

Well for the copyright information in the exifs there is a simple solution - use a preset and have that added when you import the photos into Lightroom.

Oh, there are simple solutions to all of these. In fact I probably need to change my workflow a bit, and when I "finish" a gallery, just in case, mark it all for republish and repush all the images while I sleep. I actually put copyright into it in-camera, and also in a preset again just in case.

If Devbobo is listening out there... maybe it's possible for people who count on downloads more than just display to get an option in the plugin -- "Any republish push image again?"

Though honestly I can't decide if I would want that on or not, if I had it. It really is nice to be able to quickly fix a bunch of metadata; and for me the galleries are generally downloaded within the first 24-48 hours by someone, or they aren't downloaded at all. If I am fixing months old keywords, not sure it is worth pushing the images.

But I do admit there is a point of confusion for the digital download crowd. And equally so, not even sure if documentation would fix it -- witness this "conversation", it is a pretty hard thing to explain.

devbobo

leftquark wrote: »

The Official SmugMug Lightroom Publish Plugin will also do this.

Our official plugin does not currently support this functionality.

I've been tinkering with adding this feature to the "Image Sync" functionality. But it's a little more complex than it may appear, it's not ready for prime time yet.

[Edit]
This would bring the modified metadata back into LR, but wouldn't change the fact that the original on SmugMug may not have all the metadata.

devbobo

Lille Ulven wrote: »

I don't think what you describe as a possible mess up with the filenames when you delete photos from Smugmug causes any problems in the sync process as you would anyway only delete photos that are in that smug mug plugin section.
But what gives you quite a headache is when you rename your files in Lightroom outside the Plugin and than start a re-sync. There the better way seems to be to rename those in your Smugmug galleries from the plugin first than run the re-publishing and after that you're free to rename all the other files in Lightroom

What I have seen lately is that when you have smart-galleries you will have to go to the whole syncing for those files again to match them with their "grand-parents" (parents would be the ones in the gallery they are taken from). And you can actually mark them for delete in the Plugin but because they are smart galleries and still obey to the rules you have set for that gallery you won't get that deletion processed (unless you go back into smug mug, take the whole smart gallery down, re-sync lightroom and set your smart gallery back up again).

I guess these ones could go into some bug list (which I haven't found last night) and hopefully be either fixed or explained.

Are you referring to smart galleries in LR or on SmugMug ?

devbobo

Ferguson wrote: »

Oh, there are simple solutions to all of these. In fact I probably need to change my workflow a bit, and when I "finish" a gallery, just in case, mark it all for republish and repush all the images while I sleep. I actually put copyright into it in-camera, and also in a preset again just in case.

If Devbobo is listening out there... maybe it's possible for people who count on downloads more than just display to get an option in the plugin -- "Any republish push image again?"

Though honestly I can't decide if I would want that on or not, if I had it. It really is nice to be able to quickly fix a bunch of metadata; and for me the galleries are generally downloaded within the first 24-48 hours by someone, or they aren't downloaded at all. If I am fixing months old keywords, not sure it is worth pushing the images.

But I do admit there is a point of confusion for the digital download crowd. And equally so, not even sure if documentation would fix it -- witness this "conversation", it is a pretty hard thing to explain.

G'day Linwood,

Thanks for your in-depth comments and experimentation.

The observations you have made are correct, with expection that the plugin actually tracks image metadata and determines whether the image should be uploaded or not.

I understand your frustration with the downloading of images without the updated info, but I don't believe that adding another option to the plugin to republish the files again is the solution. While this solution may work for LR users, it doesn't address the same issue for SmugMug users who don't use the LR plugin.

Hopefully a Product Manager is reading this, because I believe that the metadata (caption, titles, keywords and geodata) should be applied to the images during the download/bulk download process if they don't match the existing image metadata.

Cheers,

David

Ferguson

devbobo wrote: »

The observations you have made are correct, with expection that the plugin actually tracks image metadata and determines whether the image should be uploaded or not.

Interesting, I thought it was LR that tracked whether the developed settings had changed. How do you tell if you should upload the image (image, not metadata)?

devbobo wrote: »

Hopefully a Product Manager is reading this, because I believe that the metadata (caption, titles, keywords and geodata) should be applied to the images during the download/bulk download process if they don't match the existing image metadata.

That would be even better, I just didn't expect to get that on the fly. Don't forget the zip file builds if you do that, as well as linked images. If everything was consistent that would be ideal.

devbobo

Ferguson wrote: »

Interesting, I thought it was LR that tracked whether the developed settings had changed. How do you tell if you should upload the image (image, not metadata)?

LR does also track image or metadata changes. LR is responsible for marking photos to be republished based on metadata triggers etc. The newer Publish Services stuff is built on top of the old Export framework, and the Export framework is still responsible for actually uploading the "exported" file, the problem is at the time of uploading, I have no way to determine from the LR SDK why the file is being republished. LR provides SDK access to it's internal metadata hashes, but it's hard for me to rely on them as I don't have any control how or when they are updated. Instead, I save metadata and develop setting hashes for each image in the gallery settings. This give me more control and flexibility with syncing, especially when I add bi-directional metadata syncing.

Ferguson

devbobo wrote: »

LR does also track image or metadata changes. LR is responsible for marking photos to be republished based on metadata triggers etc. The newer Publish Services stuff is built on top of the old Export framework, and the Export framework is still responsible for actually uploading the "exported" file, the problem is at the time of uploading, I have no way to determine from the LR SDK why the file is being republished. LR provides SDK access to it's internal metadata hashes, but it's hard for me to rely on them as I don't have any control how or when they are updated. Instead, I save metadata and develop setting hashes for each image in the gallery settings. This give me more control and flexibility with syncing, especially when I add bi-directional metadata syncing.

Thanks, nice to know. Not sure why, but you never know, I've written some programs against that database, so any quirks may be useful.

Lille Ulven

devbobo wrote:

Are you referring to smart galleries in LR or on SmugMug ?

Sorry for the delay. I am referring to smart galleries on SmugMug.

wezzix

Smug Syncback for Lightroom (plugin) now also has the ability to sync keywords from SmugMug to Lightroom. You'll find details, screenshots and download here:

http://www.markuskvist.se/LightroomPlugins/SmugSyncback

hedros

Collecting captions that have been edited online has been on my wishlist for ages. The suggestions made here do not quite meet my needs so I did a little API hacking.

This Jupyter notebook shows how you can use the version 2.0 API and Python to collect captions ,gps coordinates and assigned keywords and save them in nice easily digested CSV files. Think of it as a Christmas present to Smugglers everywhere.

github.com/bakerjd99/smugpyter

Saurav Anand

Hello everyone, I wanted to share that we have added this feature in the latest update of PicBackMan - you can now download all your photo Titles, Captions and Keywords from your SmugMug account - this includes titles, captions and keywords that you may have edited online as well. This is the most comprehensive feature for anyone looking to upload photos to Smugmug with titles/captions/keywords and/or download them from the online SmugMug account.

You can download PicBackMan here: https://www.picbackman.com and I will be happy to answer any questions.

Thanks & please do share your feedback.

BigRed

@Saurav Anand said:
Hello everyone, I wanted to share that we have added this feature in the latest update of PicBackMan - you can now download all your photo Titles, Captions and Keywords from your SmugMug account - this includes titles, captions and keywords that you may have edited online as well. This is the most comprehensive feature for anyone looking to upload photos to Smugmug with titles/captions/keywords and/or download them from the online SmugMug account.

You can download PicBackMan here: https://www.picbackman.com and I will be happy to answer any questions.

Here's a question... How would a PicBackMan-downloaded image file look if (1) its original upload to SM may or may not have included a Title, Caption or Keyword, then (2) its Caption and/or Keywords were manually maintained within Smugmug?