Issue With Adding a Caption to Multiple Selected Images

You may be able to accomplish what you are wanting in XnViewMP's IPTC Editor.

The template and application set-up preferences are like an alien language to me and it never does sink into my head, causing me to have to just experiment until I achieve what I want; but, it is a powerful and very versatile means of batch-writing IPTC and/or XMP.

In the load template dialogue is a "Merge Datas" check-box that may allow appending to an existing Caption.

When I need to completely replace Captions that are already written, I find it quicker and simpler to first, use ExifToolGUI to delete the existing Captions and then use XnViewMP to install the new ones.

Hi Buckskin,

Thank you for your suggestion but unfortunately it won't do what I need.

I need to update the actual Organiser catalogue with the caption for images so I can search the catalogue for images using the combination of keywords in the captions, not the captions in the exif of the images.

For example, I might want to search the PSE catalogue for images of sunsets in Melbourne using the combination of keywords 'sunsets' AND 'melbourne'.

An image with caption 'sunsets\\\melbourne' in the PSE catalogue allows me to do that.

If needed, the catalogue already allows me to replace, delete or add captions in bulk. It just doesn't allow me to append to captions in bulk.

After thinking about it a bit more, I think using keyword tags instead of captions is the better way to go.

I have created a keyword category named Search Words into which I can add keywords to add to images either individually or in bulk.

Multiple keywords can be assigned to an image.

I can then use the Organizer's search function to enter keywords and it will return images that have those keywords attached to them in the catalogue.

This is exactly what I wanted to do but was trying to do it with captions instead.

Yes, and the advanced search also looks at the image filenames.

For example, I usually have the suffix 'panorama' in the filenames of my stitched panoramas.  Entering a search string of 'pano' and nothing else in the advanced search, all the images with 'panorama' in the filename are found.

TBH, the advantage of captions you mentioned is the main reason why I first intended using captions until I ran into the bulk appending to captions issue that resulted in this thread.

After exploring using the keywords category to create/register "search keywords" I now prefer going along this route, but that is just my preference.  There are pros and cons to both captions and keywords tags.

I also like very much the way advanced search also looks at the 'People' tags when searching for images.  I can use a combination of People and Keyword tags to find images.

Another main reason, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, I now prefer using Keyword and People tags is that I have an easily visible record in the respective panels of the keywords and names I already have registered for my searches.

A downside I now see of using captions, at least for me, is that over time I might accidentally use different keywords for the same meaning.  For example, I currently have a keyword under my "Search Words" category being 'outdoor'.  I can use the keyword 'outdoor' in combination with other keywords like 'flowers', 'sports' etc.  If I use captions where I cannot easily see the keywords I have used in the past, I might accidentally start using a keyword like 'outside' instead of the previously used 'outdoor' keyword. This would seriously mess up my searches in the future.

Anyway, thank again for your help and suggestions.  As I mentioned, I see pros and cons to both captions and keywords but using keywords does everything I need functionally and is much easier to maintain.

I dislike any of the automatic "facial recognition" features and also much prefer to do my own people tagging.

Although I have never used it, I would figure the automatic methods would make a lot of mistakes.

There are many posts about facial recognition in the PSE Adobe forum. It seems that it is widely used now and we no longer see complaints about the lack of recognition. The new version are much smarter to take many factors into account. Most questions are about the slowness of the process in the initial scanning and indexing of big libraries. With minimal hardware configs, that may be very annoying as with other automatic background processes.
However, if you have enough power and RAM, those processes can help very seriously for those who inherit a huge library from someone else without metadata tagging or catalogs. Face recognition, geotagging from phones and smart tagging will greatly help for a good organizing start.
One word about smart tagging: the results are surprisingly good in general, for instance you'll get a number of good finds for animals or places; but you get a lot of really funny and unexpected results; that alone is worth trying to get a good laugh!