Captions in Aperture not exporting to versions when original already has a caption

Thank you leonieDF,

It helps to have the problem confirmed, especially as it involves wading through the very long post. I have placed a Bug report with Apple three times since October, so maybe they will recognize this and work on a fix. Thanks again!

Sorry to hear about your problem.

I have found one ....partial (as in "sometimes")....solution.

1. Select a few photos, and under the Metadata menu go to "Write IPTC Metadata to Original".

2. (important step, as silly as it seems, it never seems to work without it) - Then deselect the photos (I will ususally select some other photos and sometimes I even will quit Aperture and start it up again).

3. Then re-select the photos you are interested in and try exporting them. Once they are exported, look at the metadata in Preview to make sure the new caption is there.

This only seems to work about half the time for me - I have no idea why or what changes; sometimes I have the idea that if other programs are running or the caches are full it doesn't work, whereas if I do it shortly after opening Aperture without much else going on it seems to work. I can use the same batch of photos from the same camera in the same library, and one day it will work and not the next, so you have to be careful not to assume that it is always working.

If that doesn't work, you can try the solution in the third to the last paragraph in the original post - not very practical for thousands of photos, but it will work for a few. You might be able to build an Apple Script to run it on the whole pack, but I don't know how you'd do that.

Apple asked me to send them information about the problem a while back, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed that someday in one of the Aperutre updates they will fix the captions and copyright info problem.

Hope this help! Best of luck.

I'm glad this helped. Don't forget to keep your eye on it though - it doesn't always work, and you can put yourself in some unexpected situations if you assume it's always working correctly. And if you change the captions again in the future you stillhave to do the same process over. Thanks for the message.

Hi Dave,

Sorry to hear about your problems. I also have noticed that the "Write IPTC Metadata to Masters" seems to work once, but not again; fortunately without crashes for me though. I have a few ideas, but all of them are only partial - potential remedies. If you can, be sure and keep a copy of your previous Vaults or Libraries (i.e. the ones from before writing IPTC metadata to Originals if you still have one) and the unchanged photo masters. Here are the ideas:

1) the fact that you are somehow getting "11 empty spaces" in the captions after the crash makes me think that the original masters may have the equivalent of one of the camera preset captions in them. To fix this, a copy of the original masters need to go through the EXIF Tool commands in terminal (see paragraphs 4-8 in the original post and the link there - you may need to use the command that removes both EXIF description and XMP, but you may loss some other data, in my case the lens information). They then are reimported into Aperture and any adjustments and metadata pasted to the new imports from the already exisiting ones in Aperture with the "Lift adjustments and metadata" command. This is quite a project and not very practical for a large number of photos, although you might be able to write an AppleScript to do it easier if you have many thousands of photos and really need to export versions now (I don't know how to do that well). For some reason, if these camera caption presets (in your case "11 empty spaces") are present in the original masters, the next idea doesn't work -

2) try exporting a master "with IPTC", and then reimport the master and paste any adjustments (with the "lift adjustments" command) to the new photos from the old copy in Aperture. (You can select only those photos that have adjustments in the filter box - makes it much quicker. You will also need to keep tract of which are the old copies and which are the new imports - they'll look the same from within Aperture). See paragraph 11 in the original post. This always works for me, provided there are no "camera captions presets" as above. Remember that if you change the caption again, it won't export properly, but you can export a version if you don't change the caption again.

3) I suspect that part of the problem you are facing is that after the crash, you restored a previous library that does not completely recognize the newly changed (the updated IPTC) masters. I think that if Aperture realizes that something in the master that has somehow changed from outside of the program, it resamples it and changes the IPTC in Aperture to that which is in the original master.

This might be a major problem for you if you do not have an older copy of the Aperture Library and Masters, because as soon as you scroll over the affected photos, Aperture will usually "update" the IPTC from the original photo and use it to replace the captions you've written. I haven't found a way to get your edited captions back in this situation, although you could run a test of taking copies of some of the originals and running it through the EXIF tool and terminal commands as above and see if your edited captions aren't in there somewhere. (You could also look at the originals in Graphic Convertor - your edited captions might still be in the IPTC caption, in which case there is hope of recovering them after removing the EXIF descriptions, sometimes the XMP needs to be removed also). It sounds like only some of your photos have the "empty spaces - camera preset" problem, so maybe the other photos now have your edited captions in the IPTC of the original Master.

4) Just my guess, but I suspect that the cause of your crashes may be that too many photos had the masters modified with the "Update IPTC to Masters" at once. I used to change the GPS in the masters with another Aperture plugin in years past, and I always noticed that Aperture could handle a small number of changes to the masters (working from within Aperture, not outside of it) without changing the captions/IPTC, but if the number exceded somewhere between 60-200 photos, it would seem to forget that it had changed the masters and lose the captions I had written. It seemed to need a small amount of time (and scrolling over the changed photos) before doing another batch and then things would work well. I would also quit Aperture once in a while - maybe after 2-3 batches.

5) My final idea - the one I'm using currently - is just wait. I am afraid this won't help with the captions that have already been lost though, and if the ideas above don't work, you might have to rewrite them. Hopefully someday Apple and Aperture will figure this out and fix it. It seems they had it all working pretty well (except for the copyright and contact information - a very similar situation) prior to the Aperture 3.4 update, and like you say, it doesn't seem like it should be that complicated. Don't forget to send a Bug report to Aperture.

I know how frustrating this is - once you get a process down and go through some painful days of repairing the damage (and especially the "camera captions presets"), it all gets back to normal.

If you have more questions, I'll try to help - I've been through this silly problem for more days of my life than I care to remember.

Best of luck - I hope it works out.

David - I'm glad to hear you still have your captions! That's a relief. Don't discard or update your old vault though until you're really sure things are all stable and working well - make a new one instead, you might still need it.

A few thoughts -

If you export the Masters "with IPTC" and don't see the correct captions, I would guess that somehow you've gotten a "preset" put in some field somewhere that is overriding your captions, and I would run a trial with a few COPIES of the affected photos with the EXIF tool commands in Terminal to see if that changes things. For me, if there was something there, it didn't seem to matter what I did, nothing would work until I fixed that first. Graphic Convertor helped me figure what fields were messing things up. Your problem might be something different though.

I would try scrolling over your photos in grid view, and check to make sure that they don't start "updating from the masters" and changing your captions to the empty spaces again. I find that sometimes everything looks like it's fine until I scroll through the photos, and then they start reprocessing the information from the original and changing the captions and sometimes the keywords and other IPTC if they've been changed. (I'm guessing that that's what caused your crash the second time - it was trying to update the IPTC from the masters at the same time as exporting. It *might* have worked if you had scrolled over the photos and allowed Aperture to get everything in order before trying to export. I think Aperture has a problem realizing that the new information in the masters is what it put in itself once it passes a certain number of photos.)

Best of luck!

Hi David,

Yes, it appears to be fixed after the 3.4.4 update. At last! So far I haven't found any new problems with it (on only one small export). Thanks and I wish you good times with the photography.