Getting captions right, quickly

Members of the AELTC Photography team heading home after another log day. AELTC/Neil Turner

I was about to sit down and write a blog post about the last four weeks of my life – three and a bit of which were spent underneath Court 14 at Wimbledon – when I realised that I had written the self-same post this time last year. Instead I thought that I’d tackle the subject that causes me the most work and the most angst when I am working as an editor; IPTC captions. For those who don’t know or whose photography doesn’t involve writing them, IPTC (the International Photo Telecommunications Council) captions are the standard for adding the details in words describing the “where, when, who, what and why” of the image almost universally used in our industry. It is a form of metadata added after taking the pictures – although if you are smart and use the right software, quite a bit of it can be drawn automatically from the camera’s own EXIF metadata.

This has already turned into a geek-fest. I apologise to those who want to read about technique and kit but without good metadata, finding the right pictures in amongst tens and hundreds of thousands of others becomes a chore and can become almost impossible.

I try to use as many ways as I can to save time and increase accuracy when captioning and four of the best techniques are found within Photo Mechanic (my absolute favourite piece of photographic software). One of them is called code replacement which allows you to use pre-defined short codes to insert longer and more complex elements into the metadata. As an example, the new Prime Minister of the United Kingdom has three entries in my own system. If I type \tmay\ the software automatically replaces that with Theresa May whereas if I type \tmay1\ it will substitute The Rt Hon Theresa May MP and \tmay2\ brings The Rt Hon Theresa May MP Prime Minister, First Lord of The Treasury , Minister for The Civil Service into the metadata. By creating a whole code replacement for the new Cabinet I can save myself lots of time typing their names and their job titles and almost guarantee to get them right every time. Code replacement can even grab bits from the EXIF and translate them into vital details.

Detail from a code replacement text file with the names and job titles of the UK Government

Following on from code replacement is autocomplete. This is a different way to add regular words or phrases easily. By creating the right kind of .txt file with all of the names and phrases you need in advance you can make your workflow a lot faster. For Wimbledon I have a list of all of the major players (well over 300 of them) correctly spelled with their correct three letter country code so that when I start to type it offers me choices from that list. With the text file loaded into Photo Mechanic when I type And it offers me a drop-down list of every person whose name begins with And. That’s several Andreas, a couple of Anders and, of course, Andy. If I keep typing then the choices shrink and I can select the one I need and add it to the caption using the return key. In the same list I have all sorts of key words and phrases including locations, sponsors, types of shot, the various competitions. There’s no limit to the size of the file and it works really well. At least it works really well on a Mac – some of the features seem to not work as well on Windows computers that I have used.

My third method of speeding up captioning is to use drop-down menus. Many of the fields in the Photo Mechanic captioning “stationery pad” allow you to pre-load options. In the cities I have a great long list of places around the world that I visit regularly and not having to type them over and over again saves time. Similarly, when I’m editing for a team of photographers I have all of their names pre-loaded into the photographer field. If you want a list of UK Counties to add yourself, you can find one here.

The final gem is variables. These take information from the EXIF or from elsewhere in the caption and turn them into words. An example would be {photog}. If I put the name of the photographer in the correct IPTC field (possibly using a drop-down menu), the variable will then copy that and insert it anywhere that I use the variable {photog} – so that could be in the main description, in the copyright field or in the byline field. There are dozens of variables and you can use them in conjunction with code replacements to automate a lot of captioning. The Camerabits YouTube channel has some good tutorials for all of this.

Captioning is a vital job and anything you can do to make it easier/faster/more accurate has to be a good thing!

ABOUT CAPTIONING

The word “caption” has two meanings in our industry. It can mean the metadata and descriptive information that the photographer supplies with their images when submitting them to a newspaper, magazine or website. It can also mean the words that accompany the photograph when it appears in print or on a website. Much of the information is the same but the way that it is written can vary and in this document we are solely referring to the information supplied by the photographer. Whether it is a hand written paragraph on the back of a photographic print or uses the latest metadata standards, the caption has to describe what the photograph shows, why it is newsworthy, who took it, who owns the copyright to the picture and when and where it was taken.

Background: Since the first news photographs were transmitted over “the wires” in the 1920s there has always been a need for clear, concise and informative captions to accompany them. The earliest images simply had a short caption typed and stuck onto a space at the bottom of the print and the words were encoded in the same way as the image so that when the machine at the other end decoded the image it simply printed the caption as if it were part of the photograph. Technology has moved on but the need for captions hasn’t. When the first negative scanners attached to Apple computers were introduced at the beginning of the 1990s along with early versions of Adobe Photoshop the style was to add some white space on the bottom edge of the photograph and use the type tool in the software to add a caption to the face of the image in almost the same way that wire photos had been doing for nearly 70 years.

Having started to develop techniques for adding data to copy as early as 1971, the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) published the standards in 1991 that formed the system that we still use for adding metadata caption information buried in the jpeg or tiff file rather than having to add it to the actual image. This significantly reduced the amount of time that it took to add captions, meant that those captions could be cut and pasted into a text document and made the actual file smaller at a time when modems were slow and every kilobyte that could be saved was a valuable contribution to transmission speeds. Today’s IPTC standards were introduced in 2001 after Adobe developed the “Extensible Metadata Platform” (XMP) - which allowed far more data to be attached to each image and introduced a greater number of “fields” in which that data could be entered.

Styles: The US news agency, The Associated Press, has published its’ style guide for a number of years. It covers just about every area of journalistic activity including the way that photographic captions are written. It dictates the tense, the way locations are mentioned and even the format in which dates are written. Photojournalists the world over have been following the AP style guide for many years but other agencies such as Reuters, The Press Association and more recently Getty Images have moved away from the AP style and developed their own ways of writing captions. Several newspaper groups have also looked at their own needs and decided that the AP standard is not entirely suitable for their needs either and we now have a very wide variety of styles and style guides to choose between.

Photographers working for a new client should always check to see if there is a style that they should follow when working for them but as a general rule IPTC captions should be clear, precise and contain the five Ws – where, when, who, what and why.

Neil Turner {photographer}

Me writing about photography because I want to…

Getting captions right, quickly

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