Macros in Captions (ProShow Compatibility item)

[Jimcamel]

ProShow had the capability to include macros in captions.  These could be system like macros for slide number, date, filename and time, etc ... but also (and much more importantly) macros for IPTC and EXIF data.  I do work on behalf of a number of camera clubs and we used ProShow heavily to display competition results in beautiful slide shows.  Each display category might be 100 or more images and these all need to tastefully carry the photographer's name, club name, image title and so forth.  We would typically load up the IPTC data in Lightroom (and we could use EXCEL to do this from the competition databases); export a fresh set of JPG's containing all the caption data and then we could format this onto the slides.  It is essential.

I appreciate you have a basic capability to do this now...but you only support a handful of the IPTC codes.  Would you be able to do two things (1) support the vast majority of IPTC codes and provide a table in your support documents to map which codes you support to specific IPTRC codes when the name or spelling is slightly different.  It's very important to support the vast majority of codes, even though some are obscure, not because we will use all of them but if you only support a small subset then we have to start corrupting their use and use codes for other than their intended purpose and that makes things worse.  The 'tag' names are not necessarily spelled the same across all pieces of software - so it's important to have a table to make it clear what-is-what.

I did some experimentation yesterday with the limited feature you have.  I was able to place some captions on a slide; turn that into a style and then propagate it to the other slides.  That pretty much worked except the text fields were not fixed in place on the slide - but tended to move about with the size of the image on the 16:9 field .... which cause the captions to move about on the screen - which is jarring from a visual point of view and in other cases caused them to run off the edge.

Can you comment on either of these issues ?

I'm excited to start working through all the other features ... but this is the key deal-maker for us and all our clubs.

jc-Oct 25-2020

 

[Igor]

12 hours ago, Jimcamel said:

I appreciate you have a basic capability to do this now...but you only support a handful of the IPTC codes.  Would you be able to do two things (1) support the vast majority of IPTC codes and provide a table in your support documents to map which codes you support to specific IPTRC codes when the name or spelling is slightly different.  It's very important to support the vast majority of codes, even though some are obscure, not because we will use all of them but if you only support a small subset then we have to start corrupting their use and use codes for other than their intended purpose and that makes things worse.  The 'tag' names are not necessarily spelled the same across all pieces of software - so it's important to have a table to make it clear what-is-what.

Hi,

This improvement can be added in future version 11.0.

Currently we support 14 IPTC tags in JPEG images and 4 EXIF tags.

Tell me what additional IPTC codes you'd like to see in PTE AV Studio.

[Jimcamel]

Thanks Igor.  I have attached 2 files :: a JPG file with metadata fields populated and a printout from running that through ExifTool.

I populated the key IPTC fields in the JPG using Lightroom Ver 10 and then exported this so the JPG contained the metadata.  I then ran the JPG through ExifTool to printout all the metadata in the file and in that printout, I highlighted the important IPTC fields in yellow.  When populating the fields in Lightroom I added a prefix of md- to what I typed in so we could find this in the resultant JPG/ExifTool dump.  

I appreciate the dropdown menu you have provided right in PTE; however, if this gets too big - as long as we can type the metadata tag ourselves into the TEXT box in the format you have, ie:  <%MainImg.IPTC.Sublocation%>      that will work fine as well.  We just need to know the exact spelling you expect for it to link up properly.

EXIF Tool Dump of Tara.docx

[Jimcamel]

Igor, I have added the attached spreadsheet - which attempts to map out all the IPTC fields available in LR; what they are called in EXIF Tool and what you are picking up in your 14 IPTC codes.  I'm not sure it clarifies the situation as much as I'd like because it is pretty confusing - names, spelling and meaning seem to be different everywhere.  Some like City, Country etc are duplicated and different spellings mean the same thing.  At the end of the day, our objective is that virtually all the basic IPTC codes available in LR's Library panel under IPTC should be able to be picked up in AV Studio so that we can insert data in the metadata field in LR and pick it up and display it on the slide in AV.  So, you are getting close and have made a lot of progress - just a need to add several more codes to reasonable complete the list.

 

Appreciated., jc

IPTC Mapping.xlsx

[Igor]

Thanks, we'll try to add more IPTC codes in future version.

[Jimcamel]

HI Igor, I am following up on your October 27 reply regarding adding additional IPTC codes.  At the time I wrote, we were about a year away from our 2020 competition season - but now we are in it and having access to these additional codes will be critical for us.   I am presenting working with a dataset of over 3,000 images and a proportion of these will need to be built into some 11 different presentations. Having the IPTC fields available means we can automate this.

Can you let me know if / when you may be able to update the list?

I would say we will need it by mid-August to prep the slide shows.  Following is the current supported list.  The EXCEL spreadsheet I provided back then (downloadable above) is still relevant to us.

thanks, jc

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