Is automatic captioning like inDesign possible in publisher?

[Tomtitomton]

My work uses inDesign, but I prefer to use affinity where possible. We have auto-captioning for images which is fairly essential for our work, as we need to create large plant palettes and auto-captioning saves us a lot of time with labeling. Is there a way to do this in affinity publisher?

Thanks,

Tom

[MikeTO]

I don't believe so. I'm using two approaches to captions in a book I'm working on. Most images are inline with text above and below. I simply have the caption follow the image for those cases. Other images span two columns and since there isn't a span columns feature I have to place those manually and wrap the text around them. To ensure the text flows around the photo and the caption, I group the caption text frame with the photo and wrap text around the group.

[Dan C]

Hi @Tomtitomton,

11 hours ago, Tomtitomton said:

We have auto-captioning for images which is fairly essential for our work, as we need to create large plant palettes and auto-captioning saves us a lot of time with labeling. Is there a way to do this in affinity publisher?

Unfortunately as MikeTO has mentioned, this isn't a supported feature of Affinity Publisher currently, my apologies!

It's certainly might be something that our developers are interested in and we may look at implementing a similar feature in a future update. I'll have this thread moved to the Feedback section of our forums now so our devs can see and consider this.

I hope this helps  

[joost]

4 hours ago, Dan C said:

It's certainly might be something...

Interesting choice of words - a career in politics certainly might be in your future. 😄

[Old Bruce]

17 hours ago, Tomtitomton said:

we need to create large plant palettes and auto-captioning saves us a lot of time with labeling.

I have read this a few times and am really confused.

Palettes, artist colours or Pallets, platforms for a forklift to pickup

Plant as in green leafy plant or manufacturing plant

Auto-captioning has me thinking this is an automatic function that increments numbers. Is it in InDesign or is it generated and added to the image's metadata by a separate application, and subsequently winkled out by InDesign)?

[Tomtitomton]

Just to clarify, I make plant palettes, which are just lots of photos of plants that relate to planting plans...i.e. green leafy things. We have a big library of plants on our server named in such a way that I can import them into an inDesign template quickly, and their scientific name is automatically attached as a formatted caption.

[Old Bruce]

5 minutes ago, Tomtitomton said:

Just to clarify, I make plant palettes, which are just lots of photos of plants that relate to planting plans...i.e. green leafy things. We have a big library of plants on our server named in such a way that I can import them into an inDesign template quickly, and their scientific name is automatically attached as a formatted caption.

Never would have come up with that definition. Thanks for the clarity.

Where is InDesign getting the scientific names from? there must be a file on the server with the image/file name then the scientific name. You could probably use that to generate a csv file which could then be used with the Data Merge function with Publisher. 

[Wosven]

6 hours ago, Old Bruce said:

Auto-captioning has me thinking this is an automatic function that increments numbers. Is it in InDesign or is it generated and added to the image's metadata by a separate application, and subsequently winkled out by InDesign)?

In ID, you have different kind of variables, able to retrieve datas from the file or from imported/placed documents with metadatas.

For example, you can add automated variables, and if the text frame containing this variable touch a picture frame with a linked content, the variable will automatically display the data (if it touch 2 or more images frames, it'll inform about "multiple links" = the app isn't able to choose which one to display).

When you create such special variable,  there's a panel with different options:

• Text before (simple text field)

• Metadata (dropdown with all the metadatas possible for an image: copyright, comment/caption, title, author, keywords...  or the file's name)

• Text after (text field)

• Position (above, below, left, right of the image frame)

• Object style for this text frame

• Paragraph style for the text

 

If you set a shortcut to add the text frame with this variable, it's really easy.

You can also have usual templates for magazines, with Lorem Ipsum and false images, and caption or copyright text frames with variables already on the pages.

The wonderfull part: if you replace an image by another one, the variables will be automatically updated (no need to search for them, copy them and zoom on your small text frame to past them and check the result).

On Windows, you can right-click an image, check its properties and modify/add important metadatas without opening them in another app. It give you a simple workflow.

A lot of sites for galleries manage also metadatas, so it's possible they are exported in columns and used this way with data merge.

[Tomtitomton]

Thanks Bruce. The actual files have the caption or name as their file name...inDesign is set up so that it doesn't include anything after the full stop, which allows the caption to import the name, but not the .jpeg part of the filename.

The CSV route sounds interesting, but I'm not sure it would compete with the current workflow (which means I can't really advocate for affinity use in the work context), can you elaborate a little? At the moment, we can quickly click place the images into our template using the place function.

Another option that could be useful would be integrating affinity with some software I use called notion, which also has a plant library, but not sure if that's dreaming at this stage.

[Tomtitomton]

This is a disorganised version of the sort of thing we create for reference.

[Old Bruce]

Re-reading your work flow makes me think that the InDesign must just be using the file name with no extension for the caption. So you can just drag and drop any photo into the frame and the caption appears.

I could set something up for you but it would be more than likely twice to ten times the amount of work for you. So let us just ask for some sort of auto thing like @Wosven outlined. Should be doable. I would really like more fields.

[Avezeau]

On 7/19/2021 at 5:24 PM, Old Bruce said:

Where is InDesign getting the scientific names from? there must be a file on the server with the image/file name then the scientific name. You could probably use that to generate a csv file which could then be used with the Data Merge function with Publisher. 

In my work flow, I embed the information (file name, photo caption, etc.) into each photo's IPTC metadata fields using Adobe Bridge's File Info Panel. When placing image in Adobe InDesign, I can then pull the embedded data out of the IPTC fields.