I recently saw a wedding book some friends had created using Photobox. They wouldn’t claim to be computer-savvy, but they’d done a great job and were able to give copies to close family. It should be just that easy, shouldn’t it, and I am more than a little frustrated that Lightroom still doesn’t have a book layout tool. No doubt it will come, even if only via an Export plug-in.

Anyway, putting together a book of my Sealed Knot pictures earlier this year in InDesign, one big irritant was displaying text next to the pictures. I couldn’t bring myself to retype or cut and paste the captions, knowing the images contained the metadata added in iView, Lightroom or Photoshop, and I don’t think it was my inexperience with InDesign. As it was, I got distracted, but next time I have a crack at it, here’s an InDesign script which pulls XMP metadata from an image and places it below the picture. Now I wonder if that could be launched from an Export plug-in….

Also a little link to Gunar Penikis’s blog and a post on the new XMP SDK. There seems to be more scripting access to XMP, and also the latest way to customize the File Info panels.