IPTC Tagging in Lightroom - A Solution?

Best get this said first - I found this plugin on the internet while searching for a solution. I bought it - no freebies. Just passing on the information & hope will be of use and thanks to the mods for allowing the post.

It seems that at the start of every season I have the same thought and go looking for a program to speed up the tagging process. There are numerous lexicon programs for key word lists, but tagging a title and caption are a different discipline to keywording. I was on the verge of finding out how much it would cost to have some custom code written when I came across the AutoReplace plugin for Lightroom.


AutoReplace is the work of John Kirkpatrick, a fellow sports photographer and so someone who will have faced the same captioning and title troubles as I have. John's solution was a to create a Lightroom Plugin that runs in background and watches as images are tagged.


Rather than typing "Richie STANAWAY (NZL) Porsche GT3 Cup race at Hampton Downs, near Auckland New Zealand. Saturday 2nd February 2013" I now simply key "\RS Cup Race \EVT" and AutoReplace replaces \RS with "Richie STANAWAY (NZL) Porsche GT3" and \EVT with "at Hampton Downs .... etc". All of the entries I want to use I can create before the race and then just edit the list for any list minute changes.


Along with the speed improvement the other massive advantage is the avoidance of typos. Not all racing drivers (or soccer players) are called Fred Smith or something equally easy to spell. How many of us could spell Mauricio Gugelmin and be sure they had it right.

Now he becomes \MG or whatever code I assign to Mauricio and I know I have the name, car and team absolutely correct every time.

The number of lists is limitless and I can swap them in and out as required.

If you would like to know more visit John's web pages at http://www.tilebarn.co​m/lightroom/index.php

As I mentioned at the start - I'm nothing more than a happy user. No doubt this is the part where everyones tells me there are 50 other anwers for the the problem and it is my goole skills that are lacking

Re: www.tilebarn.com/light​room/index.php

http://www.tilebarn.co​m/lightroom/index.php

Just been there so (hopefully) this time I've got it right

That worked.

Sounds a lot like the code replacements for photo mechanic

I will have to give this a try, i loved it on the photomechanic demo when i trialled it

Somebody posted a while back on Sportsshooter that he was looking for code replacement lists for Photo Mechanic for motorsports. I don't think that he ever found any but if anyone ever creates any and feels like sharing them there is a section for that purpose on the Photo Mechanic forums at forums.camerabits.com

Been using it in anger for a couple of months more. IUt has a few twists, but nothing that make it anything but a great peice of software. Cannot count the hours we have saved. Worth £25 of anyones money ($35 USD) if you are a lightroom user, IMHO