Feature Request: Ability to synchronize Captions

rkumar

Hi,
I was wondering if anybody has a way to synchronize captions between smugmug online albums and your desktop? Users of 'FotoAlbum' from Fototime.com will know what I am talking about. With that package, I can caption my photos on my desktop and also select which ones I want to upload to the online album. Then I hit a single button and all the selected photos (& their captions) are uploaded.

I am currently using ACDSee to organize my pictures on my desktop. So, it would ideal if there is a hack to upload (including captions) straight from ACDSee!

Any pointers, suggestions will be appreciated!

Thanks,
Rajesh.

Nikolai

Request noted
When I'm done with what I am doing now to SmugmugExplorer (in which I still have a lot to accomplish), I'll look into ACDSee plugins SDK and try to come out with something. I must say, that it is a very sweet idea, for picutre browsing I'm using ACDsee almost exclusively and all the time.
I cannot come out with any ETA at this moment, but this is defnitely be a possible and nice thing to accomplish.

Thanks for the idea!

Cheers!

rkumar

Smugmug Explorer
Hi,
Thanks for your response to my feature request. I am already a user of your Smugmug Explorer (tried it today) and it seems to work great. It would indeed be perfect if that functionality were to be incorporated into ACDSee!

Thanks,
Rajesh.

Nikolai

To give you a "warm fuzzy feeling"
.. I requested a "partner status" and SDK from ACDsee development support today. I'll keep you posted with the new info..

onethumb

rkumar wrote:

Hi,
I was wondering if anybody has a way to synchronize captions between smugmug online albums and your desktop? Users of 'FotoAlbum' from Fototime.com will know what I am talking about. With that package, I can caption my photos on my desktop and also select which ones I want to upload to the online album. Then I hit a single button and all the selected photos (& their captions) are uploaded.

I am currently using ACDSee to organize my pictures on my desktop. So, it would ideal if there is a hack to upload (including captions) straight from ACDSee!

Any pointers, suggestions will be appreciated!

Thanks,
Rajesh.

I *think* ACDSee uses the industry standard IPTC data embedded in the JPG itself to set captions.

If so, smugmug also natively knows how to use this information, and will auto-fill the Caption field for you.

If not, you might want to ask ACDSee to support this. Nearly all photo organization and editing applications do, and have for years. It's industry-standard.

It is possible that we're not seeing ACDSee's info probably, but highly unlikely. I have ACDSee, so I'll fiddle with it and see.

What version, btw?

Don

rkumar

I am using the latest version of ACDSee: 7.0. I did not see the behavior you describe, i.e., Smugmug did not display the captions I had added in ACDSee. Is there a setting that I have to tweak? In fact, what I had to do was copy and paste the captions from ACDSee to Smugmug after I had uploaded the files. It was quite painful, to say the least!

-Rajesh.

flyingpylon

rkumar wrote:

I am using the latest version of ACDSee: 7.0. I did not see the behavior you describe, i.e., Smugmug did not display the captions I had added in ACDSee. Is there a setting that I have to tweak? In fact, what I had to do was copy and paste the captions from ACDSee to Smugmug after I had uploaded the files. It was quite painful, to say the least!

-Rajesh.

Are you sure that your captions are actually getting written to the image files? Many image-organizing applications store things like captions in their own internal database. They don't get written into the image's IPTC field until you explicitly tell the application to do so.

For any developers out there, I would second Don's suggestion that you pick up caption info from a standard location- the image's IPTC field. That way, you can support many apps (I personally use IMatch) and will not have to write custom interfaces for each one.

rkumar

I checked and as suspected, the ACDSee captions are maintained in a local database, separate from the image file. I tried to find an option that would force the caption to be added to an IPTC field, but couldn't find any. In fact, the only meta-information I seemed to be able to access in ACDSee is EXIF: I then added a caption to the 'Image Description' EXIF field in ACDSee and uploaded that file to Smugmug, but at least with this field, Smugmug did not extract that as a caption.

Is there a specific IPTC field that I should be looking for? Will it work with some other EXIF field? I can check on the ACDSee forums for help.

-Rajesh.

flyingpylon wrote:

Are you sure that your captions are actually getting written to the image files? Many image-organizing applications store things like captions in their own internal database. They don't get written into the image's IPTC field until you explicitly tell the application to do so.

For any developers out there, I would second Don's suggestion that you pick up caption info from a standard location- the image's IPTC field. That way, you can support many apps (I personally use IMatch) and will not have to write custom interfaces for each one.

onethumb

rkumar wrote:

I checked and as suspected, the ACDSee captions are maintained in a local database, separate from the image file. I tried to find an option that would force the caption to be added to an IPTC field, but couldn't find any. In fact, the only meta-information I seemed to be able to access in ACDSee is EXIF: I then added a caption to the 'Image Description' EXIF field in ACDSee and uploaded that file to Smugmug, but at least with this field, Smugmug did not extract that as a caption.

Is there a specific IPTC field that I should be looking for? Will it work with some other EXIF field? I can check on the ACDSee forums for help.

-Rajesh.

Yeah, we're looking for the 'Caption' field in the IPTC header. Too bad that ACDsee doesn't write it. How lame for such a nice app to not support it. Let me know what you find from the forums...

I've never seen "Image Description" in EXIF, so that may be a non-standard field or extension. I'll have to check and see.

Don

rkumar

onethumb wrote:

Yeah, we're looking for the 'Caption' field in the IPTC header. Too bad that ACDsee doesn't write it. How lame for such a nice app to not support it. Let me know what you find from the forums...

I've never seen "Image Description" in EXIF, so that may be a non-standard field or extension. I'll have to check and see.

Don

Actually, it looks (Kodak has the EXIF reference online) like Image Description is a pretty standard field of EXIF. In fact, the Kodak reference suggests that it could be used to store captions. Any possibility that Smugmug will have the option of extracting this field and using it as the caption?

-Rajesh.

onethumb

rkumar wrote:

Actually, it looks (Kodak has the EXIF reference online) like Image Description is a pretty standard field of EXIF. In fact, the Kodak reference suggests that it could be used to store captions. Any possibility that Smugmug will have the option of extracting this field and using it as the caption?

-Rajesh.

I'll certainly look into it. I didn't recall seeing it in the official EXIF docs, and I don't think we've seen even a single photo (out of ~13,000,000) that has anything in a field named "Image Description", so it might take some digging.

Conversely, we get thousands upon thousands with stuff already in the IPTC fields.

Don

Roger

onethumb wrote:

Yeah, we're looking for the 'Caption' field in the IPTC header. Too bad that ACDsee doesn't write it. How lame for such a nice app to not support it. Let me know what you find from the forums...

I've never seen "Image Description" in EXIF, so that may be a non-standard field or extension. I'll have to check and see.

Don

Don, both IrfanView and Cam2pc can edit IPTC data. Photoshop also an but I would not use it as I tested it and it is not working properly.
I had the descriptions filled in the EXIF and so have to duplicate them into the IPTC caption so that they show up in Smugmug (grrrrrr :bash) and I have used Cam2pc for now, so have not tested IrfanView.

Roger

Aaron Wilson

hmmm
acdsee should be great! but was also wondering about like adobe elements 3.0? What I would love is to be able to do something like a ftp site. were I can upload all files and folders from my hard drive to the web site. So that my hard drive has the same layout as the site does. Or maybe a way to be able to snyc. a folder to a folder on a site. This maybe asking way to much. Just use to dealing with ftp sites, and domains i work on I have the site on my hard drive so any time I update photo's or pages I can do a snyc. or just up load all files and do a over write.

Aaron Wilson

captions
Is there a way or what program can I incode caption into photo's that smugmug will see and inport or is that still in the working? I am always to lazzy to upload then go back and write a desc.

Nikolai

Ths is a "coming soon" feature of SE

Aaron Wilson wrote:

Is there a way or what program can I incode caption into photo's that smugmug will see and inport or is that still in the working? I am always to lazzy to upload then go back and write a desc.

Not tomorrow, but soon..:-)
(I'm talking about being able to set a single/lot of captions from some specific IPTC/EXIF field before the upload)
Cheers!

eugene

Nikolai wrote:

Not tomorrow, but soon..:-)
(I'm talking about being able to set a single/lot of captions from some specific IPTC/EXIF field before the upload)
Cheers!

Nikolai, have you gotten partner status from ACDSEE? did you get their api? Any chance you will add direct upload from acdsee though S*E?