2 comments

  1. Xander Neal says:

    Hey Carl,

    Thanks for this video! Can I ask, does the IPTC Stationary Pad override the individual IPTC for that image. I’m keeping the Keywords/Captions the same but I am changing the headline to match the image content (Country/Venue etc) which obviously saves, but when I hit CMD + I on another image it displays the same headline but when I hit just “i” on that image, it shows the specific headline to that image. Does that make any sense?!

    Thanks in advance!

    • Carl Seibert says:

      Yes, that makes sense.

      The Stationery Pad (CMD/CTL+i) retains whatever it was loaded with until you edit or clear whatever’s there. Think of it as a great big rubber stamp.

      The IPTC editor (i) reads whatever is in your metadata for a particular frame at the moment and allows you to edit it in a what-you-see-is-what-you-get fashion.

      If you apply the Stationery Pad to selected photos, it will overwrite the contents of any fields in the target photos that are active in the Stationery Pad. (Have their tickboxes ticked) So, if you want to overwrite everything except, say, the Copyright field with the Stationery Pad, you would un-tick the box next to Copyright, and the Stationery Pad would skip over the Copyright field. If the field is checked active but left blank, the Stationery Pad will clear the field. By default, fields that have values in them are automatically ticked and those that don’t aren’t. But make sure before you apply! You don’t want to overwrite fields unintentionally!

      The Caption, Caption Writer, and Keywords fields have additional options. Caption Writer and Keywords have an append function (a tickbox with a little “+” symbol.) If checked, the contents of those fields in the Stationery Pad will be appended to whatever is already in the fields when the Pad is applied. The Caption field has a pulldown that lets you choose overwrite, append, or prepend.

      In your example, I would imagine you would use one of two approaches (or both, maybe). You could use the Stationery Pad to populate all the fields except Headline, and then go image-by-image in the IPTC editor to fill in the Headline.

      -or-

      To do Headlines in batches, you could get everything done except the Headline, using whatever workflow you want. Then, clear the Stationery Pad (Button at bottom left). Then, with only the Headline field active (Double check it!) go back and apply Headlines to batches of photos.

      Hope this helps.

      -Carl

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