Author Topic: Abbreviated Camera Mode  (Read 5417 times)

Offline IanGoldstein

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Abbreviated Camera Mode
« on: July 25, 2007, 08:33:56 AM »
While most code replacement usage appears to be for sports photography, I have found some other uses that work well for me.

In this example, I am using it to allow me to have shorter text for the camera's program mode, instead of the currently longer text returned by the {mode} variable. For example, I would prefer to show the camera's mode as "A" instead of "Aperature Priority" or "S" instead of "Shutter Priority". (I shoot Nikon, but for those using Canon you might want to see "Av" or "Tv"). Based on some experiments with Photo Mechanic, the following is a list of all the various values I know of that may be returned by the {mode} variable...

   Normal
   Aperature Priority
   Shutter Priority
   Manual
   Creative
   Action
   Portrait
   Landscape
   Pan Focus
   Macro
   Sports
   Night Scene
   Program AE
   Fast Shutter
   Slow Shutter
   Bulb
   M-DEP
   A-DEP

Unfortuantely, I do not know how accurate this list is, nor how comprehensive it is. I also fear that actual text strings written into EXIF data by cameras could be returned, thus preventing this list from ever being a complete list of possible values. Nevertheless, for my needs I am expecting to only see the "Normal", "Aperature Priority", "Shutter Priority" and "Manual" modes so it does work quite well.

Your requirements may be different, but you should be able to adjust my code replacement file to suit your own needs. If you look at the file, you'll see that it's fairly simple and easy to understand.  You'll also note that many of the entries have comments which may help you determine what text you actually want to display for the various modes.

However, in order to really make this work well, I'd like to see some official support in Photo Mechanic for such "custom variables". I did make a feature request for this (http://forums.camerabits.com/index.php?topic=1763.0), but unless enough people are interested in it, I'm sure it will remain a low priority item.

To actually use this replacement in captions for slideshows, image galleries, contact sheets, etc. you need to include the following "pseudo variable"...

  \mode{mode}\

-Ian


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