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Can TP8 write iptc captions to a border under every photo?

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diana:
I have thousands of scanned photos of varying size that have iptc captions inside the file. Now, most people in my family can't see iptc data in a file unless I put a text caption on a border under the image - which works on computers and for those without them via a tv or dvd player slide show.

I need to batch write iptc captions to every photo at the bottom of the picture.  Images vary in size but I usually add a 600 pixel white border below every image as it is large enough to contain my largest captions, then placing the top of my left aligned text at x=0, y=-590 (y must be negative to measure from the bottom up) so it fits nicely 10 pixels under the image. Software that can place the text just where I want it on any size image as above, can't word wrap, arg!  I crop excess border in batch mode with Irfanview since it can figure out what is all white and crop the edges to that. I have TP7 Pro and can't find a way to do this.

Another feature I'd like to see is to be able to calculate the font size based on the image size as in >=300 and =501 and

Daan van Rooijen:
> I need to batch write iptc captions to every photo at the bottom of the picture.  Images vary in size but I usually add a 600 pixel white border below every image as it is large enough to contain my largest captions, then placing the top of my left aligned text at x=0, y=-590 (y must be negative to measure from the bottom up) so it fits nicely 10 pixels under the image. Software that can place the text just where I want it on any size image as above, can't word wrap, arg!  I crop excess border in batch mode with Irfanview since it can figure out what is all white and crop the edges to that. I have TP7 Pro and can't find a way to do this.

TP7 has the necessary functions but if they will all work the way you want, I don't know. The devil is usually in the details..

In steps..:
[*]Resize images
[*]Use Transform | Crop/Add Border to add a border (use To a certain pixel size, or By a negative number of pixels)
[*]Use Image | Stamp to stamp the desired IPTC field in the border (click the small button to the right of Text to get to the IPTC fields). Fiddle with the positioning and sizing options to (hopefully) get the desired result. I doubt if text will be wrapped - didn't try..
[/list]

You can do all this from batch commands too.

diana:
Thanks for your reply!  I tried all those items as listed but that stamp feature I can't get to work for me. I can't get it to wrap text which makes it pointless to continue on trying to figure it out but I've tried nevertheless. I've dabbled with the stamp feature before finding it not very intuitive so maybe it's user error.

Placing text using a value from the top of the image can't be used in batch mode as few images are the same height (and I want them that way) and all need to be captioned under the image within the border area. I must place the top of the text 590 pixels up from the bottom of the image and 10 pixels from the left side and there's no way to set that in the stamp dialog I can see.  Even if you can enter a negative value, it does not work. That -590 pixels from the bottom of the image to the top of the first line of text in the caption setting works with every image I have added a 600 pixel white border to at the bottom, no matter the height or width of the image. I chose 600 pixels as it is just large enough to handle my longest caption.

Setting the position by pixel offset just doesn't seem to work for me either.  If I have an image 1031 pixels tall, I want the text 1041 pixels from the top - and that ends up in the border center about 300 pixels below the image rather than 10 pixels below the image at the top of the border.  Very bizarre output.  Truncated text on both ends no matter that I chose left aligned.  I remember coming away frustrated and confused trying to use the stamp feature before and I'm still that way.

Daan van Rooijen:
Yes, I was afraid it wasn't going to be easy. I just wanted to be sure that you knew which tools are available.

One thing that may help is to first bring all images to the same size using the Add Border command, preferably in a lossless format like PNG or LZH-compressed TIF. When you've done that, you can run a second batch that adds an additional border at the bottom (which is then at the same position for all images) hopefully making it easier to stamp the IPTC data into it in a consistent manner.

diana:
Thanks for the tip Daan but I'm going to stop fiddling with TP7 for the job because it won't wrap the text and that's a deal breaker even if I found some workaround to make the text placement work for me on tall thin images and very wide and short images too without doing one by one. I'll keep looking for something that can achieve this on any size image in batch mode.

I really need the capability to place text with word wrap anywhere on any size image because the text is relative to the image left, right, top and bottom sides and the number of pixels to the top or bottom of the text from either side, top or bottom. There should be user choice how to combine those so one can lay text on an image or in a border around the image.

I expected to be able to lay text in a border on top just above the image based on the image top and the bottom of the text and a known border height or lay text right under the image based on the image bottom, a known border height and the top of the text or even place rotated text against the right or left side of the image with similar knowns and relative positions.

Negative numbers to move the text up from the bottom or from right to left on the sides. Positive numbers move the text down the image from the top or left to right on the sides.  I'm surprised this can't be done already in several apps.  Do people really put caption text on images one by one these days and add line breaks to wrap text to fit every image?  I edit iptc text one by one as I add it to the image, but that's the last time I'm messing with typing in text if I can help it - I'll use it to place captions where I need them but I'm not doing that one by one either, unless there's only one image to do.  Surely I'm not the only one that wants people to actually be able to read that iptc caption when viewing the image.  I see some web thumbnail galleries show exif, iptc, and xmp in html under the image so to make it portable, why not in a border below the image?  I'm ranting, sorry. ;-)

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