InDesign CS5: Live Captions

By Terry White in CS5, InDesign, Learning Center, Tutorial, Video Tutorials
Friday April 23, 2010

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Quickly create image captions using the image’s metadata.

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Author: Terry White Terry is the author of Secrets of Adobe Bridge from Adobe Press and co-author of InDesign CS/CS2 Killer Tips, from New Riders. Terry is Worldwide Creative Suite Design Evangelist for Adobe Systems, Inc., and has been with Adobe for over a decade, where he leads the charge in evangelizing and showing Adobe’s Creative Suite products to users around the world. Terry is both an Adobe Certified Expert and Creative Suite Master. He has been active in the industry for over 20 years and is the founder and President of MacGroup-Detroit, Michigan’s largest Macintosh users’ group, and is a columnist for Layers magazine. Terry is the host of the top-ranked Adobe Creative Suite Video Podcast and author of the world renown Best App Site (your source for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch app news and reviews; www.bestappsite.com), Terry White’s Tech Blog (http://terrywhite.com/techblog), and is a key presenter at major industry shows around the world.

Eugene (Reply) on Friday April 23, 2010

For the last 10 years I’ve been placing images in InDesign – I’ve been getting images from multiple sources. And I have never seen any metadata in any images that is of any use.

Why would I want the title of the image from stock photos in the caption?

You can put them into Bridge – well you could always do that. And in CS3 you had a Label Graphic script that allowed you add captions to images. But can you add the metadata through Mini-Bridge?

Ok it’s impressive to have Live Captions, but you still have to add the meta data to the image, if it’s not there and you have 100 images to get through it would be still time consuming to go through all that metadata options. I don’t know anyone that has taken the time do create metadata in images – in 10 years.

How about the Paragraph Style – I see that you can assign a Paragraph Style through the Live Caption dialog box – but can you create a Paragraph Style from there? Or do you have to go back out of that Dialog Box, create a Paragraph Style and return to the Live Captions dialog box?

Then the problem comes with metadata and images stored on servers. If you have used an image on the server and someone updates the metadata and the caption changes in your document. Seems a bit risqué to me.

Seems a bit too time consuming for me. Normally when I put in captions someone always needs to make a change to something – and for me to

1 Open Bridge
2 Edit MetaData
3 Update the Live Caption

while I have a client waiting for me to make changes… I don’t know seems a bit easier to just update the text with the change.

Is the metadata dynamic? When you change the Caption in InDesign will it update the Metadata in the image? Or is it just a one way street?

Seems like a Metadata panel would have been useful. Click an image and fill in the metadata in a panel in InDesign.
joe (Reply) on Friday April 23, 2010

>Seems like a Metadata panel would have been useful. Click an image and fill in the metadata in a panel in InDesign.

this.

CS6 killer feature probably.
Bradley Watkins (Reply) on Friday April 23, 2010

Ok it’s impressive to have Live Captions, but you still have to add the meta data to the image, if it’s not there and you have 100 images to get through it would be still time consuming to go through all that metadata options. I don’t know anyone that has taken the time do create metadata in images – in 10 years.
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