Getting captions right, quickly

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

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.

Screen Shot 2016-07-15 at 12.05.42

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.

One comment

  1. Pingback: Workflow “greatest hits” | Neil Turner {photographer}

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