Anyone want to try a new feature that’s coming in my Search and Replace plugin? Update: If so, it’s now in the current version of the plugin, updated November 2016. The new feature is called “caption builder” and I hope its purpose is obvious – you can build up captions from other fields. You’d use an expression like “Scene in {stateProvince} with {title}, copyright {copyright}”.

See Jonathan Pow’s article Lightroom Caption Builder for Photojournalists, Sports Photographers and Stock Photographers for a practical example.

If you want to experiment with the custom codes feature, here is a zip file of sample files.

 

SNAG-0008

This version also includes a couple of smaller but handy features on the Transfer tab:

  • Transfer the folder path to keywords – this parses the folder path and turns the folder names into hierarchical keywords
  • Parse the caption to keywords – similar, but this adds each word as a keyword under the top level ~Caption keyword

One tip is that these can produce keywords such as “C:” or “and”, “the”, “with”. I don’t see a good way round this – other than the user marking those keywords as do not export. It also hits problems with compound terms like Buckingham Palace where you’d probably want keywords such as “Buckingham Palace” and “Palace” – but not “Buckingham” on its own since the building is nowhere near that town.

All three of these features come from user requests, so Search and Replace users, now is the time to ask Santa to add your own special request.