I think that in the Publishing Manager for Facebook the setting Facebook Title should be Facebook Caption due the nature of Facebook Gallery. At least could you please put the IPTC Caption as option for that setting.
For those using Lightroom 3 or 4, you can presently achieve the above (using IPTC Caption instead of IPTC Title) with a workaround as follows (*Note: this may change if Facebook/Lightroom integration changes due to updates):
- Right mouse click on the Facebook panel under Publish Services.
- Choose Edit Settings... from the pop-up menu.
- Under Facebook Title > Set Facebook Title Using and select: Leave Blank.
Now when you publish to Facebook, the process seems to automatically use the IPTC Caption. However, I found it also added the metadata value stored in Copyright to the end, which is kind of annoying if you do want use that attribute. (e.g. it would look like: "This is my house. Bob Builder").
Can Lightroom please be updated to use the IPTC caption field in the Facebook uploader to caption photos (instead of the IPTC Title field)? Or at least provide the option. This would be a better mapping of the fields to use.
Currently the FB Publisher has a drop-down field that supports setting the Facebook "image title" (i.e. description) via one of "Filename", "IPTC Title", and "None". The correct IPTC field to use is Caption (a.k.a. "caption/abstract"). "Title" is intended as a shorthand reference, not the descriptive text. Worse, other services, such as Google Photos, use the correct field when auto-populating their captions, forcing us users of both services to have to do silly things, or use third party plugins in LR.
Since there's already a pulldown option for choosing, and you already support one IPTC field (the wrong one), why doesn't the FB Publisher to allow the user to select IPTC Caption as well?
I've found Lightroom's Facebook upload support to be shoddy, to say the least.
I've worked with the Facebook API before, and I've never found the API to be unreliable like Lightroom's upload feature is. I'd love to see improved Facebook support in the next Lightroom version, which I believe would be as simple as rewriting the API code to use the latest APIs (and possibly a better http library).
Additionally, Facebook's photo title field now tends to be called "description" on their website. I'd like to be able to tell Lightroom to populate the description with the photo's caption metadata field.
You might consider this third-party Facebook plugin. It provides lots of flexibility in how the Facebook description is set, including the use of LR's caption. The author has an excellent reputation for maintaining his plugins.
Before anyone complains, my suggestion isn't meant to diminish the desire to have Adobe fix this basic bug -- it's just a workaround for those tired of waiting years.
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