Jeffrey Friedl has written several plug-ins for Adobe Lightroom. I've been using his SmugMug plug-in and found it to a great way of increasing my productivity when working with digital images. You can get the plug-in here:
The newest version allows you to build SmugMug Captions using Preset Template Tokens. Here's what I use:
<center> {Title} <br/>{Caption} <br/>{City|Location|"Corvallis"}, {State|"Oregon"}. </center>
The title from the photo's metadata is the first line of the caption. An HTML line break (<br/>) generates a new line and then the Caption is written on the second line. Another html line breaks creates the third line. Then, the first non-empty metadata of either City or Location is used. If both are empty, the Corvallis is entered. Finally, the State metadata is written if it's not empty. If it is, Oregon is written. Notice that a space appears before each <br>. Without the space, Google will see the last word in the Title and the first word in the Caption as one word and thus make keyword searching less effective. Finally, the whole thing is wrapped with html center tags to center it all.
Just don't forget to click the HTML option button.
Jeffery's SmugMug Plug-in is great assest to have!
Earlier Versions of the Plug-In
After using the first version of the SmugMug Plug-In only a few times, I quickly decided to change the way the plug-in handles captions. The plug-in allows you to select the priority for finding the data to use for a caption. But, what I wanted was to build my own caption from several Lightroom data fields.
So, here's the simple change I made:
local function get_one(letter, photo, filename)
local eol = ' <br>'
local myTitle = photo:getFormattedMetadata('title') .. eol
local myCaption = photo:getFormattedMetadata('caption') .. eol
local myLocation = photo:getFormattedMetadata('location')
local myState = photo:getFormattedMetadata('stateProvince')
if string.len(myLocation) > 0 then
myState = ', ' .. myState
else
myState = ""
end
return '<center> ..' .. myTitle .. myCaption .. myLocation .. myState .. '</center>'
end
It's pretty simple to understand even if you don't write code. This new function builds a caption based on the Title, Caption, Location, and State fields in Lightroom. The title, caption, and location and state are all on separate lines. The if statement simply says the if there is a location then add a comma and space in front of the state. If there is no location, then set the state to blank too. The whole caption is then wrapped in some html code to center the whole thing.
You can make this modification yourself by simply replacing the existing code in the get_one method located in the caption_source.lua file that is located in the plug-in directory with the code listed above. Be sure to make a copy of the caption_source.lua file before making any changes in case something goes wrong.
Note that you'll need to repeat the process everytime you update the plug-in so update to the latest version and use the new caption builder.
Enjoy!