Sometimes, it’s tempting to try to tell a long story under a photograph but after experimenting with five different programs, I would recommend limiting your IPTC Captions to one line. People’s names, for instance, and a date, if you must. Otherwise, you could run into printing problems.
XnView, for instance, does not wrap Caption text. The cursor starts at the center and runs any excess off both ends. This is an issue they may repair at some point.
ACDSee Pro will do almost anything you want, but unless you’re using it exclusively …
but this won’t work in either jAlbum or Adobe Elements, both of which only recognize the Caption field for printing. I don’t see much of jAlbum in my future so that’s a non-issue. Adobe Photoshop Elements doesn’t take IPTC seriously enough for my taste so I don’t use it.
“Excess” information can be added to the “Special Instructions” field in MediaDex, ACDSee Pro and XnView, but XnView does not have unlimited space for this and will truncate any efforts to include or print the whole.
Legacy Family Tree imports Caption into its Description field, and if you want to put its content under photos in a Book Report, for instance, they would fit better if it was only a person’s name, anyway. It doesn’t recognize Headline, Copyright or anything else.
Welcome to the un-standardized side of the standard of IPTC. If I’ve left you in the dust, here’s today’s conclusion: Unless you’re able to use up-to-scratch (probably paid) software, use the Caption field in IPTC and keep it short.
Despite my best efforts to make family history brain-dead simple for my descendants, they are still occasionally going to have to put a picture here and some information over there together all by themselves.