All my Legacy Captions became Captions in New SmugMug instead of Titles

WinsomeWorks

Legacy SmugMug only had a "Caption field; it had no "Title" field as NewSmug does-- so the one & only option we had on Legacy (one would assume) should have become the title field on NewSmug, even though the larger field on NewSmug is now called "Title", and the smaller field (for a longer description or subject info) is called "Caption". I figured all my Legacy captions, since that's all I had, would become Titles in NewSmug, since that's clearly the more important field. But no. That's not what happened.

I just uploaded a photo into NewSmugMug (I haven't published yet). This photo had been edited in Photoshop & I'd added a Title and Description (Subject) which came up very nicely in my New site. The title is large & the description is smaller, which is just as it should be. But that led me to see that I have absolutely no titles (the important part) from any of my many 1000s of photos that are on my Legacy site!! Everything has gone to the little tiny caption field.

I am just praying & praying that someone can tell me there's an option to bring those old "Captions" from Legacy into the new "Title" field instead! Please!! (even if it has to be done behind the scenes) I have had so much bad news about NewSmug today when delving into stuff. I don't think I can stand any more. :cry Even if I had the rest of my life to copy all those old captions into my new title fields, it's not even possible. I just tried copying a caption out of that field, & it told me the photos are protected and can't be copied!!! (yes, inside the "Edit caption" box! Good grief.)

pbandj

WinsomeWorks wrote: »

Legacy SmugMug only had a "Caption field; it had no "Title" field as NewSmug does-- so the one & only option we had on Legacy (one would assume) should have become the title field on NewSmug, even though the larger field on NewSmug is now called "Title", and the smaller field (for a longer description or subject info) is called "Caption". I figured all my Legacy captions, since that's all I had, would become Titles in NewSmug, since that's clearly the more important field. But no. That's not what happened.

I just uploaded a photo into NewSmugMug (I haven't published yet). This photo had been edited in Photoshop & I'd added a Title and Description (Subject) which came up very nicely in my New site. The title is large & the description is smaller, which is just as it should be. But that led me to see that I have absolutely no titles (the important part) from any of my many 1000s of photos that are on my Legacy site!! Everything has gone to the little tiny caption field.

I am just praying & praying that someone can tell me there's an option to bring those old "Captions" from Legacy into the new "Title" field instead! Please!! (even if it has to be done behind the scenes) I have had so much bad news about NewSmug today when delving into stuff. I don't think I can stand any more. :cry Even if I had the rest of my life to copy all those old captions into my new title fields, it's not even possible. I just tried copying a caption out of that field, & it told me the photos are protected and can't be copied!!! (yes, inside the "Edit caption" box! Good grief.)

I was happy that my old "captions" transferred directly into "captions" in the New Smugmug, since mine tend to be wordy descriptions (many of my galleries are travelogues), and I might choose one day to start using shorter Titles on certain photos, though I haven't made that a practice. Kinda too late now, but it would have been nice for Smugmug to have given us a set of options to choose from during the migration, such as whether to transfer captions to Title or Captions in New Smug. You might check with the help desk as well to see if there's anything they can do for you.

sarasphotos

Actually, it sounds to me like SmugMug got the field mapping just right. According to industry standards, the Caption is the same as the Description, which is supposed to include detailed information about the photograph. The Title is a briefer version of the Caption/Description. (See: https://www.iptc.org/std/photometadata/documentation/GenericGuidelines/index.htm#!Documents/iptccorecontentsection.htm )
If you're editing in Photoshop then you probably have access to either Lightroom or Bridge. I know that for Lightroom there is a great search-and-replace plugin where you can transfer the information from one field into another. Personally, I can't imagine using SmugMug alone as a photo organization tool - it sounds like a nightmare to me. My workflow is to do all editing and organizing in Lightroom (or Photoshop) and then sync the galleries to SM. That way I always have the master copy on my computer and when I change the photo in Lightroom it's flagged to be re-published to SmugMug. And using the jfriedl SmugMug plugin I can even define a custom title and caption by choosing EXIF/IPTC fields to go in the SmugMug Title and/or Caption fields. Right now I use a combination of "Caption | City, State Country" in the Caption field. You can see an example here: http://www.sarasphotos.de/PublicGalleries/Flowers/i-qqvRKfb

Good luck with the move.

Cheers,

Sara

ChancyRat

Legacy SmugMug only had a "Caption field; it had no "Title" field as NewSmug does-- so the one & only option we had on Legacy (one would assume) should have become the title field on NewSmug

This makes no sense to me ... Legacy had no title field - it had a caption field. So captions translate to captions, and since there are no titles in Legacy, no titles translate over to New.

You can customize the caption font size to default to larger with CSS. I need a little help myself with this on my site but haven't gotten around to asking about it yet.

Maybe this set of customizations? http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations/Fonts-Links

This prompted me to check on a couple of useful links for customization:
http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=237930
http://www.sherlockphotography.org/Customisations

agallia

Agree with ChancyRat that Captions should translate to Captions/Description in new Smugmug and new Title is a clean field for just that if one wishes to add it.

WinsomeWorks

I feel that most of you are totally missing the point on this, and focusing intead on the actual name of the fields. That's not my point; who cares what the field is called exactly? Yes, on the face of it, I can see why many folks might assume that, "well, captions remain captions & shouldn't go to a field that's called "title" or something different". But my point is that, since captions were all we had, and furthermore, since the title & caption fields from our PhotoShop edits did not (in Legacy) go to the correct places, this is a mess for many of us. That point makes a huge difference as far as what fields the former "Captions" should now go to... or at least have an option to go to! Can't we mostly agree that, since we were only given one field in Legacy SmugMug, we chose to display in that one field the most important concise but descriptive phrase we could, on each photo? Therefore, it stands to reason that we would want those most important phrases to end up, in New Smug, in the most important slot there is-- The Title! Why would we want the most important phrase relegated to a slot below that?

No, I really don't want to implement some code that's going to force captions bigger, etc. etc. because there's already such a yucky issue with even the Titles being far removed from the photo.. on my site, even that field is below the fold, with the stupid photo numbers right below the photo in the prominent position my captions used to have. If I implement some code, the captions, even if bigger, will still be below the numbers and below the blank Title field. I don't want my Title field blank. Besides, on many photos that I've edited, I do have longer, descriptive stuff that I should place in the Caption field one by one when I get a chance, so I'd like that field to be available to me for that purpose.

Most importantly, I'd like to remind everyone (especially the PhotoShop users!) that you probably have me to thank for even getting us to the point where we have two fields, or at least that the PhotoShop fields now go to the correct place!!! I'll find links later, but let it be known that I begged for this many many times over the yrs, & lots of people argued back. (Even though I knew from uploading to many other sites that SmugMug had the PS thing wrong) So to be sure, I am totally thrilled that the PS Title / Description fields now go like this in New SmugMug: PS "Title" > becomes Title . PS " Description" > becomes Caption !! Hoorrayy!! This is (finally) correct, & is how it works on every Stock website to which I upload, & every other site as well.

So to get the whole picture, you've got to realize that in Legacy, I had to manually delete most of my PS-edited titles in my SmugMug galleries, because what came over to my caption fields in Legacy was the PS Description field (often too lengthy!) & paste in the captions instead from other websites. (and most of my images are SOOC & never went thru PS, so they too are affected, by the 100,000s) But now here I am again, basically back at square one, with all those titles now relegated to the caption field... aaaargh! Yes, eventually I may get LR figured out etc. etc., but SmugMug could've made it so much easier by at least giving us an option of where we wanted that one caption field to go.

Allen

It would be a disaster if Legacy captions were transferred to Titles in NewSmug. You would lose all
multi-line captions. Don't know if you noticed but NewSmug Titles are only one line.

Plus they would lose any html in the captions. NewSmug preserves that html in captions.

WinsomeWorks

Hmm, no, didn't really notice that problem because...wait for it...I have no Titles!! : Yes, I should've noticed this on other sites, but I've been looking at the larger layout issues. Well, my question about that is: why?? (Yes, I realize I won't hear a good answer for that). :-( But what is meant by "one line", exactly? I mean, one line of a certain number of characters (if so, what number?) or of a certain dimensional length, or what? Idk if I have any html in my captions... possibly somewhere... It seems to me they could've preserved that in Titles too tho, if they'd have wanted to.

Here's the thing: I could live with whatever they want to call the boxes my descriptive text is in, whether it's a Title or Caption or whatev-- if only I could get it to be right under the photo in SmugMug style, or better yet, take the place of those useless numbers. The once in a blue moon that any of my visitors cares a hoot about which number they're on is if they're trying to get a list back to me of what #s they want me to do something with. On the other hand, I know for a fact that my visitors care a whole lot about the captions, as I've had thousands of conversations, comments, emails, etc. due to the connection a caption made. So I don't want that to go below the fold in SmugMug Style, because it doesn't occur to most people to look for something far below the photo, in that setting. I'm sure one of you brainy magicians is gonna come up w/ some hack to put numbers back up where they used to be, or make captions get close to the preview photo in SmugStyle, & move into the Title spot if no title, etc. etc. right?!

Allen wrote: »

It would be a disaster if Legacy captions were transferred to Titles in NewSmug. You would lose all
multi-line captions. Don't know if you noticed but NewSmug Titles are only one line.

Plus they would lose any html in the captions. NewSmug preserves that html in captions.

Allen

This about the photo nav and caption placement has been discussed many times in the last two years.
This is not the time for that discussion because it makes no difference getting your site into NewSmug.
Maybe in the future this might be addressed but for now ya gotta focus on what they handed you and adapt.

leftquark

Titles and Captions are working as intended and as most people have noted, as expected as well. Yes, it's unfortunate that Old SmugMug did not support Titles, but at least now it's being done the right way.