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recently truncated keywords


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Hi fellow contributors

I've been in Alamy since 2003 (scary). I do my photo processing in Nikon Capture NX 2.4.7 on Windows 7 before transferring to Adobe Photoshop CS5.1 prior to uploading the JPEG copy to Alamy. Just recently three batches of photo uploads have been getting truncated keywords (Tags) whereas the caption and date taken seem OK.

Even more recently I've changed from to Photoshop CC (2019) and also changed to Windows 10, so now it could now be something to do with Nikon Capture not getting on with Windows 10.

I hope someone will know why or have a good idea of what to try next.

Thanks, Tim

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There was another statement by someone in the last couple of weeks that thought it was caused by the FTP upload and wondering how to fix it. Last time I checked, nobody had answered his thread. Probably because no one else was experiencing truncated tags, so couldn’t work out a solution or opinion.

Are you using FTP? If so, that might be a link to his same problem.

Betty

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Thanks for posting Betty, no I'm just using the standard web-based upload, Alamy IT has looked at the situation and couldn't see a problem my only consolation is that I am a relatively low volume up loader so it's possible for me to manually copy the keywords from Photoshop into Image Manager but it’s not really ideal.

Tim

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I stopped putting all my keywords into Lightroom beforehand a long time ago because I spent more time cleaning up the truncations after upload than if I'd entered everything manually. It also often happens when I try to paste tags from one image in the Image Manager to another. Then I have to spend time trying to figure out which words are truncated or missing completely.

 

So now I either enter tags into the Image Manager one or a few at a time that I copy from a text document, or else copy from an existing image in the IM, making sure to keep a careful eye on the number of words selected so I can make sure the same number get pasted. I like to double-check everything anyway, so I'd rather spend the extra time verifying as I go along than doing detective work to try to clean up afterwards. 

 

I figure what I lose in number of images posted due to all the time it takes me, I gain in numbers of views and zooms. But I do hope to do more posting when I can spare some time from a project I need to work on, and when I take a break from all the shooting summer encourages. I still have to go back and clean up/finish tagging some of the images I rushed to post.

Edited by KHA
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A few months ago I switched to FTP uploading, should have done long ago. I apply keywords via Photo Mechanic, then customise keywords in some images once accessible in AIM. Never seen any truncated, nor from when I used to use the web upload. This problem must be a pain for the OP and IT Support.

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8 hours ago, KHA said:

stopped putting all my keywords into Lightroom beforehand a long time ago because I spent more time cleaning up the truncations after upload than if I'd entered everything manually.

Surely there has to be something more going on here, it can't be a Lightroom problem, so may people use it. Granted I suppose not everyone puts in their tags in advance but I certainly do and I've never had anything truncated.

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22 minutes ago, Harry Harrison said:

Surely there has to be something more going on here, it can't be a Lightroom problem, so may people use it. Granted I suppose not everyone puts in their tags in advance but I certainly do and I've never had anything truncated.

 

I do some pretty hefty tagging, pushing the character limits, so that could have something to do with it. I'm a lover of language and naturally see things from many perspectives, so unlike many here, I spend more time having to delete excess tags I wanted to use than coming up with them.

 

I don't mind the extra work, because it's paid off in my CTR, and by doing them manually my perfectionist soul feels better about verifying things are correct as I go along.

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3 hours ago, KHA said:

I don't mind the extra work, because it's paid off in my CTR, and by doing them manually my perfectionist soul feels better about verifying things are correct as I go along.

Absolutely nothing wrong with that, I certainly need to devote a lot more time to my own. If I'm understanding it correctly and individual keywords are truncated, rather than some kind of character limit on the entire block, then that's very strange, no wonder they haven't got to the bottom of it.

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It was me that asked the question the other week. All my keywording is done in Adobe Bridge, as they have for the last 13 years. Backup files are then kept already keyworded, and the originals uploaded via FTP. Same thing happened on the last upload as well. Doesn't seem to be any relationship to do with amounts of words or characters. Weird!!! Using Filezilla - latest version.

 

Alamy , anything on your side??

 

Webby

Edited by Webby
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I can confirm each keyword is not truncated, but rather the entire keyword field is truncated significantly (as Harry says like a character limit, in this case 50 or so).

As a PC user I have increasingly started to use Google chrome for my web uploads but when everything was working I was using Internet Explorer, so I'll try that again or maybe the new Edge?

Alternatively it maybe worth trying out FTP 

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55 minutes ago, Tim Ayers said:

I can confirm each keyword is not truncated, but rather the entire keyword field is truncated significantly

 

So it seems there are two different problems going on here, both equally intractable with probably different causes I would imagine. In your particular case with the 'character limit' issue then I wonder if it is always precisely the same number of characters that it breaks at or if it isn't precise is there a threshold below which it never breaks?  I use Chrome on a PC but that is on Windows 7 64-bit and Lightroom rather than Photoshop. I don't know Nikon Capture but could you miss it out from the chain for a couple of images just to perhaps eliminate it from your enquiries? 

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In the middle of this happening I changed PC, but it was all working fine for several years with Nikon Capture - Photoshop CS5.1 - Internet Explorer on Windows 7 x64, then it all went awry.

Now I've updated several variables but one thing that it's possible is that for the last few batches on the old PC I may have used chrome so I may revert to IE, I can also as you suggest try a different RAW program (Lightroom or Capture NX-D). Thanks for you time.

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With me it's not as simple as character limits, because as in the example I mentioned with pasting from one image in the Image Manager to another, the number of characters had already been accepted in the original image. I selected all the tags, say 30, and pasted them into another image through the tag entry box. Upon pasting, there were only, say, 22 tags, and some of the ones that were there had been cut off. When I deleted those, and repasted each tag individually it worked fine and there was no problem with the number of characters.

 

Perhaps there's a limit to how many characters can be copied or uploaded that's different from how many characters can exist in the final output.

Edited by KHA
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Since these problems have occurred I have been going into AIM and first of all selecting and deleting all the tags in the truncated upload field, then I get all the keywords in photoshop and copy them into a the word editor MS Word (or similar). Then as my keywords are not separated by a comma I search for all spaces and replace them with a comma and a space using the find/replace all functions, this is to ensure that each keyword is separated by a comma which is essential, these can then be copied en-masse into the "Add new tags" box and when you hit return or select the blue cross symbol at the end of the new tag box they will all be all magically appear.

Try this method, you shouldn't have to paste individual words

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22 minutes ago, Tim Ayers said:

Since these problems have occurred I have been going into AIM and first of all selecting and deleting all the tags in the truncated upload field, then I get all the keywords in photoshop and copy them into a the word editor MS Word (or similar). Then as my keywords are not separated by a comma I search for all spaces and replace them with a comma and a space using the find/replace all functions, this is to ensure that each keyword is separated by a comma which is essential, these can then be copied en-masse into the "Add new tags" box and when you hit return or select the blue cross symbol at the end of the new tag box they will all be all magically appear.

Try this method, you shouldn't have to paste individual words

 

I don't actually use individual words as tags anymore, which is one reason I suspect my issue differs slightly from others'. I tend to max out the character count in each tag by using multiple words separated by hyphens (and separate each tag from another with commas), so it's not an issue with a single word getting truncated; it'll be a word(s) at the end of a series of words. When it's just a matter of having reached the maximum character count of that tag, I can tell, because it automatically goes into the tag list without me hitting enter, and I simply delete the extra word upon reentry. But often, as mentioned, the same word count that doesn't work when it's automatically uploaded, or pasted, works when I enter it directly into the Image Manager. That's why I wondered in my previous post if it was a limitation with the copy/upload function having a smaller character limit than the tag itself.

 

When I've tried to copy and paste a whole series of my complex tags from my text doc at once it just turns into a mess, so that's why I do things in smaller chunks now. 

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Hyphens? I’ve never separated words in a phrase with hyphens unless it modifies another.  My multi-word tags are like this:

pink cherry blossom,bluejay in a tree,   (four-year old girl,multi-word tags)

using the hyphen only when it should naturally be used. Not that I’m saying it’s wrong, just wondering if it

would affect truncation.

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1 hour ago, Betty LaRue said:

Hyphens? I’ve never separated words in a phrase with hyphens unless it modifies another.  My multi-word tags are like this:

pink cherry blossom,bluejay in a tree,   (four-year old girl,multi-word tags)

using the hyphen only when it should naturally be used. Not that I’m saying it’s wrong, just wondering if it

would affect truncation.

 

I didn't mean to go this in-depth about my process; I was actually just trying to let the OP know he wasn't alone. But since everyone keeps asking, here's more clarification.

 

Unlike with compound modifiers, I put a space before and after each hyphen to separate words. This helps me keep distinct words separate from multi-word phrases. E.g., "Woman - Women - Girl - Girls" vs. "Woman running through park".  Visually, it helps me to have a hyphen separating them rather than a space so it's clear they are separate words rather than a whole phrase describing something. Image Manager doesn't actually import/show the hyphens; it seems to treat them as spaces. It could possibly be an issue, except again, when a tag that had these separating hyphens already removed upon placement into a posted image in the IM and looks fine, but then gets pasted into another image and gets truncated or disappears completely, it does suggest the hyphens were not the issue.

 

Now when I used to put these hyphenated tags into Lightroom, they did frequently break up into individual tags upon import (but not always, puzzlingly) even though I only used commas at the end of the entire tag, along with sometimes disappearing completely, so that's why I stopped putting them into LR before upload. And even ones that didn't have hyphens sometimes broke up; e.g., "Fashion Week New York City February 2019" might become "Fashion", "Week", "New", "York", etc., and since that maxed out 50 tags pretty quickly, there would be tags that evidently got imported but that I couldn't see until I deleted others. So the IM would say I had 50 tags, but then I would delete one and the number wouldn't go down to 49. I would have to delete many, many tags in order to finally see that number change.

 

I have adapted, so it's really not an issue for me. I was just showing solidarity with the OP.

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I develop in LR, tag in Bridge, never LR, so I don’t know LR tag foibles. The only time I had truncated tags is when they were called keywords 😂 just before the new AIM began. AIM didn’t play well with the old Image Manager. In every image, many keywords were truncated. The most horrible mess to straighten out, and it took me months to fix 5000 images.

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Yes I've the tag problem but also another problem I've caused. This is transferring the metadata from old images to new ones in photoshop, I've just found out this process also includes the taken on date. So now I have to check the date taken on 4000 images, ho hum.

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18 hours ago, Tim Ayers said:

Yes I've the tag problem but also another problem I've caused. This is transferring the metadata from old images to new ones in photoshop, I've just found out this process also includes the taken on date. So now I have to check the date taken on 4000 images, ho hum.

😲

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