Indicating when the Description field reaches a certain limit.

[loweskid]

I thought this little tip might be useful -

The photo agency I submit to (Alamy) has a 150 character limit on the Description field, so I wanted a way of indicating when I've gone over the limit.

I entered this as a Custom Template in Footer 4 ...

Desc. field limit:  {File.MD.description|numcomp:gt,150,OVER !,OK,length}

So now when I'm over the limit it displays 'OVER !'  otherwise 'OK'.

[Mario]

Neat! Creative use. IMatch sometimes amazes even me! 

Thanks for sharing!

Incidentally, this was my 14900th post...   

[loweskid]

Neat! Creative use. IMatch sometimes amazes even me! 

And me..!  I don't think I could function without IMatch now.

Incidentally, this was my 14900th post...   

When you reach 15,000 do you buy us all a drink or do we buy you one?

Certainly, if you ever visit Manchester, UK, the drinks are on me..!

[Lincoln]

Thank you, thank you I am also with Alamy and other libraries - your tip solves a long standing issue for me. 

[Mario]

Certainly, if you ever visit Manchester, UK, the drinks are on me..!

I may gladly accept this when I'm in Manchester the next time. Probably will need a visa, though 

[sinus]

Thank you, thank you I am also with Alamy and other libraries - your tip solves a long standing issue for me. 

The tip from loweskid is cool and it is nice from him to share this. 

But, Lincoln, if you had asked for such a thing, we here in the forum would have helped you before with this.
Variables are really powerful and we had some cool examples here on the forum before.

IMatch gives a lot of possibilities ... hm, a beer or two in Manchester would be nice ... maybe a IMatch-great-tips-round. 

[Mario]

This thread gave me a good feature idea. I made a quick test and it was easy enough to implement. I think you will like this:

[sinus]

Ha, cool!


Sometimes easy things makes life easier. 

I wonder, how you created the "image" with the explanation text.

[loweskid]

Brilliant...!! 

[Mario]

Sometimes easy things makes life easier. 
I wonder, how you created the "image" with the explanation text.

I made a screen recording (same software I used for the IMatch Anywhere tutorials) and then converted it into an animated GIF for upload.

[Mario]

Brilliant...!! 

True 

[Lincoln]

But, Lincoln, if you had asked for such a thing, we here in the forum would have helped you before with this.
Variables are really powerful and we had some cool examples here on the forum before.

Thanks Sinus - you are correct of course. Its just one of the things on my to-do list! The ultimate for me would be a plugin for Imatch that replaces this Lightroom plugin
https://www.lightroom-plugins.com/AlamyIndex.php

[Mario]

I could not find it by looking on the Alamy site, but if there is a Lr plug-in, there must be some programming API for Alamy.

Naturally, if somebody sits down and writes a plug-in, there is a much larger market in the Lr user base than there is in the IMatch user base (I presume).

25 pounds for the plug-in is not that expensive either. I don't know if Alamy charges money for using their web API - some companies do,  e.g., smugmug.
If you want to access their API, you have to pay them money. And this money has to be collected from the users of your plug-in. Unless you make money from selling the data of your customers, you have to charge money.

Anyway, thanks to the all new scripting system in IMatch 2017, implementing this kind of plug-in will be much easier than before. Same for plug-ins for Facebook, Instagram or others. It all depends on the demand...

[loweskid]

The original Alamy Lightroom plug-in was developed because Alamy had their own non-standard keywording system.  They had three keyword fields - Essential, Main and Comprehensive. Keywords could be embedded into the IPTC Keyword field before uploading to Alamy but when they reached the Alamy site they would all appear in the Comprehensive field and then had to be sorted into the appropriate fields.  The Lightroom plug-in allowed the sorting to be done before sending to Alamy and it would automatically load them into the correct fields.

I never used the plug-in as I don't use Lightroom and I found sorting the keywords on the Alamy site a pain in the neck so I gave up embedding them into the files and just entered them directly on the Alamy site.

They have done away with all that now and gone back to just the standard Description and Keyword fields.  Keywords (or 'tags' as they are now calling them) can be a single word or a multi-word tag.  All this can be done very easily in IMatch.  Once they are fully captioned and keyworded I upload to Alamy, then once they have passed quality control they are ready to go on sale (usually within 24-48 hours).

So I can't really see the point of a plug-in for IMatch - unless I'm missing something I can't see what it could do that can't be done already by IMatch.

[Mario]

Plug-ins with specialized functionality may be useful for things like managing your own 'galleries' on FB or similar.

If you can prepare metadata in IMatch and your target site supports drag & drop upload, most of the work can be done in IMatch and then you just drag the images to the web site. Not much a plug-in can improve there. Which is why there is almost no demand for such and I did not spend time with it so far.