flCaptionater v1.1

Introduction

flCaptionater is a program that allows you to quickly enter captions for a folder full of digital pictures.
You can also optionally type in a short category or rating for each picture.

How to use flCaptionater

Getting started

flCaptionater will load all the .jpg files in the folder you set. Many Canon digital cameras store a thumbnail (.thm) of the movies they make, and so if flCaptionater finds an .avi file, it will try to show the thumbnail that goes with it.
The first time you run flCaptionater, you will need to choose a folder to start in right away. It is recommended that you select the main folder that all your pictures are in. Once you have selected a folder, flCaptionater will search through the folder and its subfolders for pictures. Each one it finds will be shown in the left hand side of the window.

Captioning pictures

Once you've got some pictures loaded, you can quickly add captions. Type a detailed (yet brief) description of the picture. Hit the Enter key. The next picture will automatically be shown, ready for you to give it a caption!
If you want to slow yourself down slightly, you can also type in a category. Pressing the 'Tab' key will jump to the category/rating box. After you press Enter, the next picture will be shown, ready for you to caption.

Recommendations:

Although you could come up with a catchy title for each of your pictures, if you plan on taking a lot of pictures you should think about how the caption will help you find the picture back later. Without writing a novel, what makes this picture special or different from any other picture you could take?
If you have a lot of pictures, you might want to just caption them, and worry about categorizing/rating them later. If you can settle into a "look, caption, enter, repeat" groove, why break it to rate your photography?
If you think you won't be able to keep your cursor out of the category/rating box, you may want to follow a few tips:
1. Although you can store whatever you want in this area, it is suggested that you not use the space character. Because of the way flCaptionater exports and reads text-based caption files, it will get everything after the first space confused with your caption. If you don't ever intend to export a text file, this won't bother you.
2. Stuck for ideas of how to use the category/rating box? Grab a sticky note and a pen. Write down several different categories your pictures could fall into (scenery, work, church, friends, family, artistic, class notes, and so on). Then, take a pencil and circle a letter in each category that is different from any other letter you've circled. Stick the note on your monitor, and use it as a key. Add a number (maybe from 1 to 3, however) for your rating after the letter. So if you had a really good Railroad picture, you'd type R1 in the category/rating box. A really bad Nature picture would get an N3.

Going further

Changing it up

If you want to caption a different folder of pictures, you can use the "Select root directory..." from the file menu to point flCaptionater where you want.

Text captioned pictures

flCaptionater currently supports two ways of dealing with text files. The following dialogs can be accessed from the Tools menu.

Exporting - write the contents of flCaptionater's database to a text file

This is accessed via 'Tools/Export captions...'
The first choices allow you to either export everything you have captioned in the current folder, or export everything you have captioned. If you choose "Write directory headers", flCaptionater will write the folder name above the list of files in the folder. You can choose to not write categories and ratings.
After you click Export, you will be asked to which file to export to. You can save to a new file. If the file already exists, flCaptionater will put the exported captions at the end of the file.
Showing - choose a file to read text-based captions from

This is accessed via 'Tools/Show captions from...'
If you haven't already captioned a picture, flCaptionater can look for it's caption in a text file. This dialog allows you to pick (or type in) a caption file. To pick a file, use the '...' button. If you type in a simple filename (like 'captions.txt'), flCaptionater will look for that file in whichever folder you load pictures from.
flCaptionater can use a caption file if it has the picture filename (which matches the filename shown under the picture in the main window) followed by an optional category/rating which should not have a space. The rest of the line is then considered the caption. For example,
```
/IMG_0092.jpg v1. This is the main window of flCaptionater
```
is the way that the text caption file should be written for the screenshot above.

Details

flCaptionater stores your captions in a SQLite database file named flcapt.db, which should be accessible via any SQLite client. Should you suspect trouble with your database, feel free to contact flCaptionater's author.
The user interface of flCaptionater is built using the FLTK Libraries which allowed me to easily conjure up buttons and menubars. The filename list currently uses Jason Bryan's Flu_Tree_Browser, the image display is pinched from Michael Sweet's flPhoto source code and the EXIF data is read using Davide Pizzololato's jhead-based library found on a forum somewhere. This program also uses a patched version of Greg Ercolano's Fl_Native_File_Chooser, which is distributed along with the source.
flCaptionater is (c) 2004-2005 Nathan Vander Wilt, and distributed under the terms of the GPL on which flPhoto is based.

Download

At the moment, I only have flCaptionater compiled for Windows. Other binaries should be available eventually. If you have trouble compiling, please contact me.

flcapt-1.1_exe.zip - Windows version
flcapt-1.1_src.zip - source code