Adding line breaks to a lightroom caption? (Windows)

[RedCure]

Hi all,

Having an issue adding captions to my images. I produce images mostly for Facebook pages, usually clients would like a blanket description on each image with links to their website and other information. This is all well and fine, unless there is a need for two separate paragraphs.

Example: Using ctrl+enter or ctrl+j produces a line break in the caption box.

Checking the file properties after export shows that this formatting has been lost.

Copy+pasting this text, or uploading the file to Facebook text now reads:

"Text A Text B Text C"

The result is clients upload photos with messy looking captions!

The original of:

"Grab your tickets for next week's <event name> from:

website

Photos: | my website | my facebook |"

Becomes this:

Is this a limitation with Windows? Or am I missing something?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[johnrellis]

I just verified that LR Windows preserves line breaks in captions when it writes the captions to file metadata and when the photo is exported or published.

When Windows File Explorer displays the caption in the Properties window, it removes the line breaks in the display, but they remain in the file. 

I published a test photo to Facebook, and it preserves line breaks. Note that when you publish to Facebook, the contents of the Caption field are ignored and not displayed in Facebook -- Facebook displays the Title field.  When I set Title to have multiple lines and published to Facebook, Facebook properly displayed the multiple lines.

[RedCure]

Hi John, thanks for the reply.

Have just tried using the Title field instead and still no joy.

Image 1 using the Caption Field, Image 2 using the Title Field and Image 3 with a typical client description.

Caption and Title fields respectively read:

"Caption A

Caption B

Caption C"

For image 3 it seems the text length is just right for the URLs to be bumped down a line, but line breaks are still not preserved.

I have noticed that if I use the Title field for say the client information, then the Caption field for my photo link it adds a line break between the two, however there seems to be a character limit to how much is displayed from the title field!

[johnrellis]

Which exact version of LR do you have?  Please do Help > System Info to find out.

[RedCure]

Lightroom version: CC 2015.8 [ 1099473 ]

[johnrellis · Accepted solution]

Oh, I see the source of confusion: You're manually uploading photos to Facebook via the Web browser, whereas I was using LR's Facebook publish service (which is what most people ask about here).

Let's start with these fields in LR:

When manually uploading to Facebook via the Web browser, I see what you see. Facebook is deleting the line breaks:

This is a Facebook issue outside of LR's control. The title and caption in the file's metadata have the line breaks properly stored. (Windows File Explorer elides the line breaks in its Properties window.)

But when I upload via LR's Facebook publish service, the Title field from the catalog becomes the caption on Facebook, the Caption field from the catalog is ignored, and line breaks are preserved:

If you use this third-party Facebook publishing plugin (which has an excellent reputation), you can use LR's title, caption, or a combination of both (or other metadata fields) to set Facebook's caption, e.g.

(This is all on Windows. I've identified a bug in Mac LR with respect to new lines stored in Title and Caption fields and will be filing a bug report.)

[RedCure]

Thanks for all the work! I will certainly start using a LR publisher when I am doing the uploading.

Will have to just mention it to clients who prefer to do the uploading themselves as a little warning!

Thanks for helping and making LR a better place!