When you upload photos to Facebook, is there an easy to set the captions of all them so your name, your link or the date is included? Yes there is and this lesson teaches you how to do just that, for existing photos in the Lightroom3 library photos. Then I show you how to set it up for future photos you import from your camera.
Below: the caption “Photo: http://www.michael.currin.co.za”; is automatically replicated for all the photos when uploading to FB
To change the caption of existing photos, go to Library mode in LR3 and scroll down to Metadata. The dropdop menu says Default view, but I prefer Large Caption view since I am only changing the caption. I’ve put my website page link in the Caption, then saved it as a Preset called “Caption MichaelCurrin”. I could add something to the caption such as “2011-11-09 Magazine shoot. Model: …. Make-up: …. “. It seems pressing enter doesn’t create a new line in the final caption.
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Library view, right column
To set caption that for all the photos in the folder (or your whole library if you want)
- select the photos in grid view (Ctrl-A for all in folder)
- the caption field will say <mixed> if some of the selected photos have different or missing captions
- type a caption / choose a caption preset
- you get this dialog.
(You could use Sync Metadata function instead.)
Now, when you export those photos as a JPGs from Lightroom3, the caption can be viewed in the EXIF data in a photoviewer or Windows Explorer. An especially useful part of setting the caption is that when you upload those exported photos to Facebook, the caption will be filled in already.
You could of course set the caption for a bunch of photos in Windows Explorer. But the advantage of Lightroom is you can apply your Caption Preset to photos automatically on import. When importing photos from your camera or hard drive, set the caption to your preset, as below.
Import dialog, bottom right
This will be applied to all the photos imported in this batch. It should hopefully become your default caption on each future import as well. It’s a good idea to save it as part of an Import Preset (below), which defaults to your last chosen Import Preset. This one below is for importing photos for my External hard drive (letter J). The develop setting includes a split toning I like to add to a lot of my photos.
Import dialog
Thanks for reading, let me know if the instructions are clear enough. Be sure to check out my other lessons on Lightroom and photography.
