Image Captions?

[Norm Young]

 I didn’t notice in option for adding  captions to images in Affinity Publisher. That would be a nice feature to add if it doesn’t already exist, or isn’t already in the works. Great application so far! Thanks.

[Fixx]

Some caption solution would be nice. What they have in InDesign or Word are not very user friendly, so I just prefer at the moment to have separate text boxes (inline texts in Word) for captions. An easy but reliable mechanism would be appreciated.

[walt.farrell]

You can create a text frame for the caption, position it with the image, then group them via the Layers panel.

Then they are one object, and you can move them where you need them to be.

[John T]

I was unable to create a text frame Publisher would not let me so, I created a picture frame and converted it to a text frame.

I was then able to group it with the picture.

Worked fine.

[GuyMiklos]

Yes Walt! This works so well that I have put in my assets panel, grouped together, a text Frame with a filler image grouped with a text frame containing a pre-formatted caption in the text style that I've defined for captions. This saves me loads of time. I often need to adjust the size of the frames, but half the layout work is done if I use the asset and just replace the image.

Unfortunately I can't get the caption numbering to work. Any suggestions?

[Douglas Alder]

Grouping a pre-formatted Picture Frame and a Text Box and then storing them as an Asset is not a bad idea as a workaround, but it can get muddled when you need to change the style, drop shadow etc of the caption. 

I am attempting to layout a 40-page book with over a hundred photos, each with a caption. What I really am missing in Affinity Publisher are easy-to-use Captions on Picture Frames. This is a basic feature in Apple Pages and it was a bit shocking that it is missing in the Affinity product, especially when I see that people have been asking for this for a while on this forum.  

I realize that it is possible to build captions, but it requires many steps:

• draw a Picture Frame, 
• draw a text block, 
• align it to the Picture Frame, 
• set the Text Style. 
• Group them, 
• set the Text Wrap. 
• store as an Asset

That is a lot of steps, for something that is a check box in Apple Pages. Once I had gone to the effort of creating a number of these Picture Frame/Caption text boxes, I encountered another issue, if I wanted to go back and add an FX to the Picture Frame, that is NOT applied to the Caption Text box, I have to ungroup them and start all over again. For example, I wanted to add a Drop Shadow to my Picture Frames. The drop shadow was also applied to the text frame and I could not see an easy way to get rid of it. As mentioned, I am working on a project with over a hundred photos, so you can see why all this would get very tedious to add and group the captions for each photo.

Apple Pages  - One Click, enter text. Format frame, without formatting the text.

[MikeTO]

2 minutes ago, Douglas Alder said:

Once I had gone to the effort of creating a number of these Picture Frame/Caption text boxes, I encountered another issue, if I wanted to go back and add an FX to the Picture Frame, that is NOT applied to the Caption Text box, I have to ungroup them and start all over again. For example, I wanted to add a Drop Shadow to my Picture Frames. The drop shadow was also applied to the text frame and I could not see an easy way to get rid of it.

Hi, you don't need to ungroup them. Instead of selecting the group you just need to select the picture frame. Double click on the picture frame to select it instead of single clicking which selects the group. Or select the frame via the Layers panel. But regardless, there's no need to ungroup which would obviously lose your text wrap settings.

But yes, I agree that adding a caption feature for images would be a great addition to Affinity.

Cheers

[Douglas Alder]

3 minutes ago, MikeTO said:

you don't need to ungroup them. Instead of selecting the group you just need to select the picture frame. Double click on the picture frame to select it instead of single clicking which selects the group. Or select the frame via the Layers panel. But regardless, there's no need to ungroup which would obviously lose your text wrap settings.

Thanks Mike for pointing this out. Knowing this is very helpful. I have been playing with the Assets method and it seems to work, especially with the method you point out of isolating the object to change.

Captions are such a valuable feature, it seems like until Serif adds Captions to the feature set, at a minimum, they should put a Picture Frame/Text Frame combination in their default Assets.

[MikeTO]

1 hour ago, Douglas Alder said:

Thanks Mike for pointing this out. Knowing this is very helpful. I have been playing with the Assets method and it seems to work, especially with the method you point out of isolating the object to change.

Captions are such a valuable feature, it seems like until Serif adds Captions to the feature set, at a minimum, they should put a Picture Frame/Text Frame combination in their default Assets.

An asset wouldn't satisfy enough people. Some people want captions below, others want them on the left or right. Some will want them on top for figure names. People would want to control the offset.

It would be better for Serif to just wait and do this properly - users can make their own assets that meet their own names. Serif may also choose to bundle this feature with a table of figures or illustration feature because they would go hand in hand. We can dream.

[Douglas Alder]

Starter set with top caption and bottom caption. 😀

Captions.afassets