Book printer supporting IPTC or EXIF captions?

dagordon

Hi,

I have a bunch of photos that I want to have printed in a bound book. All of the big online photo printing services offer this option (smugmug doesn't yet, unfortunately). The problem is that, unlike smugmug, none of these services seems able to read the IPTC caption of an image and use that as the image's caption.

I have not yet captioned the images I want to print, but there are many images involved, and manually entering all of the captions into, say, snapfish's online service doesn't seem to be a smart idea, as the captions will then be tied to that particular service. The captions won't be available if I view the photos anywhere else.

Renaming the image files so that each image is named with its caption is an option, as the online services will, it seem, use a file's name as the caption. But this doesn't seem like a very good option, as I want multiple images to share the same caption text, and you can't have two files with the same name.

This is absolutely baffling to me. Why won't the online services read an image's IPTC tags, or even its EXIF tags, for the caption? (I'd like to use Picasa to tag with IPTC tags, but I'll use EXIF tags if some book printing service supports that instead.)

smugmug, thankfully, reads these tags. But, as I've said, they don't offer photo books.

Flickr will read IPTC tags, but the book printing service they've teamed with (QOOP) seems pretty lame (for example, they don't offer hard cover books).

Any ideas? Anyone know of a photo book printing service that will read an image's IPTC tags and use that as the caption?

Thanks!

mercphoto

The problem, I would think, would be which tags exactly would they pull as the caption? What if you didn't want every photo captioned? The various tags in JPG files appear to be, at best, only marginally standardized. The rotate flag, for example, of a Canon 20D in-camera JPG is observed by some programs but not others. Smugmug does not observe it, for example. Photoshop does.

dagordon

mercphoto wrote:

The problem, I would think, would be which tags exactly would they pull as the caption? What if you didn't want every photo captioned? The various tags in JPG files appear to be, at best, only marginally standardized. The rotate flag, for example, of a Canon 20D in-camera JPG is observed by some programs but not others. Smugmug does not observe it, for example. Photoshop does.

It could pull the caption from the IPTC caption tag. The EXIF orientation tag that Canon cameras manipulate might not be read by various programs, but these tags are standard.

Again, smugmug reads IPTC and EXIF captions just fine.

mercphoto

dagordon wrote:

It could pull the caption from the IPTC caption tag. The EXIF orientation tag that Canon cameras manipulate might not be read by various programs, but these tags are standard.

Again, smugmug reads IPTC and EXIF captions just fine.

Again, no, Smugmug doesn't.
http://mercphoto.smugmug.com/gallery/2516853#132177113

dagordon

mercphoto wrote:

Again, no, Smugmug doesn't.
http://mercphoto.smugmug.com/gallery/2516853#132177113

Sorry, perhaps you have misunderstood me twice now. By "IPTC caption" I meant just that, the IPTC caption tag. That is, there is actually an IPTC tag called CAPTION. Smugmug reads this. No one is claiming that smugmug reads every IPTC or EXIF tag, such as the EXIF Orientation tag.