Comments vs. Captions Confusion

[Paul Verizzo]

It's time for me to get serious to caption/comment/keyword my
collection, thus only partially done.  I've done some in bits and pieces
with other image programs, usually Irfanview.   I have read the digiKam
overview on DAM, damn!  It's the best explanations for the real world
out there!  I've searched the digiKam online handbook for references to
captions and to comments, and I see both.

And yet, all I can see using the Captions/Tags button is Captions.  
Nowhere do I see a Comments option despite use of this term in the handbook.

If I insert a Comment using Irfanview, it comes up in digiKam as a
Caption.  In Picasa, a Comment.  If I insert a Caption using digiKam, it
shows up in Irfanview and Picasa as a Comment!  My head spins!

It's my understanding that Comments is peculiar to JPEG and is inserted
to the file, regardless of IPTC, and that Captions is a peculiarity to
the latter.  No?  Presumably, then, a non-JPEG can't have Comments?

It seems stock photo agencies expect Comments for the prose explanation
of the photo.  I'm good with that, yet, unless I just can't find it, no
Comments ability in digiKam!

Or, is all this just a misuse of words, people substituting Captions and
Comments for each other too freely?

And thank you SO much for the work on this project!  Especially the
Windows compilations!  I look forward to 1.8, especially for that
thumbnail rebuilding per folder ability.  I wouldn't call 1.8 just a bug
fix, it is more.

Paul
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[gerlos]

Il giorno 29/gen/2011, alle ore 15.19, Paul Verizzo ha scritto:

> If I insert a Comment using Irfanview, it comes up in digiKam as a
> Caption.  In Picasa, a Comment.  If I insert a Caption using digiKam, it
> shows up in Irfanview and Picasa as a Comment!  My head spins!
>
> It's my understanding that Comments is peculiar to JPEG and is inserted
> to the file, regardless of IPTC, and that Captions is a peculiarity to
> the latter.  No?  Presumably, then, a non-JPEG can't have Comments?


No: you can attach metadata (comments, iptc, most exif, ...) not just to jpg, but also to png, tiff and other, less common, formats. I'm not sure, but I think we can also add dng to this list...
So, no problem with that.
But you should know, not every software or service out there supports all those metadata on all those formats. Only with jpeg you can be sure that all the metadata will be read (almost) everywhere.

Afaik, as default, digikam copies the text you enter in the caption field into every "caption" o "comment" metedata field available for the image, so you don't need to worry about it. You should be able to read your description/comment/caption everywhere, and services like flickr and stock agencies will import that data in the right way.

regards
gerlos

--
"Fairy tales are more than true, not because they tell us that dragons exist,
but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten."
                                        G. K. Chesterton
       <http://gerlos.altervista.org>
gerlos +- - - > gnu/linux registred user #311588

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