CUSTOM PICASA BUTTON TO FIX IMAGE CAPTIONS FOR SM



if you’re using picasa to organize your photos, and upload them to your wordpress blog, facebook and/or google+, you’ve probably noticed that sometimes the picasa caption doesn’t show up on the web.
the reason for this is apparently a number of metadata fields (e.g. caption, description, and title fields in either EXIF, IPTC or XMP metadata) that are used differently depending on the software you use.

to solve this problem, i’ve created a custom picasa button that will copy your picasa caption (caption-abstract) to the relevant XMPC:title field that is used (amongst others) in wordpress as the attachment title. the most important line of code is the following exiftool command:

exiftool.exe -overwrite_original -"xmp:description>xmp:title" *.jpg

disclaimer: script and button were successfully tested with picasa 3.9.0 and exiftool 9.03 in windows 7, but i cannot take responsibility for data loss. you should apply this only to copies of the original files, and always keep backups!

how to install:
  • save this file and export contents to C:\Tools\PicasaScripts\
  • get the latest exiftool or here (032015) windows executable and save it to the same directory. if necessary, rename the file to exiftool.exe (i.e. remove “(-k)” from the filename).
  • install picasa button or here

when the picasa configure buttons screen appears, highlight the buttons “Captivate All” and “Captivate One” and click “Add”. they will be placed next to the email, print, export buttons near the bottom of your picasa window:

now, you can batch-process either (1) all the files in the active directory (Captivate All), or (2) update just individually selected files (Captivate One), by clicking the respective button.

known issues: wordpress seems to avoid using very long attachment titles. if the image caption exceeds 80 characters, it will paste the filename into the title field and add the full XMPC:title as the description.

the batch file code is a modification based on picasastarter’s ExportCaptions button, and information from the picasa button api page.