Limit caption size

[Frank]

I cannot find an answer to this question on the forum so if anyone can help I would be grateful.

Is there any way to restrict the size of the Caption field. I do appreciate a lot of folks want more room but my editor has to restrict captions to 255 characters as this is all that his particular system allows.

[Kirk Baker]

I cannot find an answer to this question on the forum so if anyone can help I would be grateful.

Is there any way to restrict the size of the Caption field. I do appreciate a lot of folks want more room but my editor has to restrict captions to 255 characters as this is all that his particular system allows.

No.  By the way, the IPTC specification (from the mid-1990s) says that the Caption field may be up to 2000 characters.  What system does your editor use that has such a small limit on the size of the Caption field?

-Kirk

[Frank]

Thanks for the very quick respnse Kirk.

I think that the restriction is due to field limitation set by the agency website itself. I suspect to conserve bandwidth? They have about 250,000 images on line so I suppose that if every contracted photographer like myself submitted large captions the costs would soon mount.
 

[nmf]

Not a solution within PhotoMechanic but until you can find one maybe this will help :

http://www.supermagnus.com/mac/Word_Counter/

Maybe not perfect as you will have to copy and paste across to the Caption field, and I doubt it will work with Code Replacements, but it will save you having to count the characters every time.

I think there may be other options but this is one I have used when I have needed to work within character limits and haven't found copying and pasting to be a problem.

It could also be worth reading the thread from a couple of weeks ago where somebody was looking for ways to automatically transfer text into the Caption fields as that may offer some ideas for your workflow or that of your editors or, at least give you an idea of limitations you may face.

[Frank]

Hi nmf thanks for the suggestion.

Looked at the software but I use Windows 7 so not compatible. I have started to use Windows Word to simply copy the text, I can input about three and one half lines, then then paste it into word. I then use the word count feature to check that I am not over my limit.

The agency is to update the hardware/software for the site fairly soon so I hope that the restriction will be removed.

Thanks again for the suggestion.