 My preferred method of captioning is to write the text directly onto the photo, making it part of the photo. This means that anyone, using any software to view the photo, can read the caption. Many photo editing programs allow you to write text directly onto the photo. This is fine for doing a few photos, but if you have a few dozen or few hundred to do, then my current software of choice is Breezebrowser. I use Breezebrowser to put IPTC caption data directly onto the photo in a semi automated process. This page will outline the process using Breezebrowser.The sequence in a nutshell is: 1) Enter the IPTC caption data 2) Caption the photos, using the "Proof" command in Breezebrowser, putting the IPTC caption data onto the photo. 1) Enter the IPTC Data - this can be done in "Main View" mode (viewing a single image rather than the thumbnails), or if viewing thumbnails, be sure to select all the ones you want to caption (going to Main View is the same as choosing "select all" in thumbnail view). While viewing a single image, or an image in a thumbnail selection, right click on that image and choose "Edit IPTC Data" (or choose this selection from the "Edit" menu). If you are the caption writer, you can put your name in as Caption Writer and select "Apply to All" which will write the IPTC data to all images in that folder (this can be done for any IPTC field). Then write the caption for that image. You can use the "Next" and "Previous" buttons to move on to the next or previous photo and write the caption data for it ... and so on. A hint is to enter line breaks (enter key) at spots you think the lines should wrap (this will depend on the number of caption lines that you have, the font size you use for captioning, and the size of your resulting image) since Breezebrowser doesn't do automatic line wraps. Experiment with this.   2) Proof your Photos - In Breezebrowser, "proofing" means creating a new photo from your original using various options. It is in the "proofing" that your photos will be captioned. There are a large number of options - the main ones that you will generally use will be resizing, adding a border, sharpening, and adding a watermark (the caption).a) Size - in general, for a typical computer today, a good photo size for on-screen viewing are maximum dimensions of 800 x 600 pixels. The downside of going larger is that for those with computer displays of 1024 x 768 or less (most computers today), a larger photo will exceed the screen size (remember that most viewing software has borders) and the user will have to scroll around to see the whole photo. On my CDs, I include the original photos as well as the proofed (captioned) photos so people can always go back to the largest possible image for high quality printing. b) Border - this is where you can add a white space for the caption. I've found that for the font I use (a 7 or 8 point sans serif font such as Arial), that about 20 pixels per line works well. Since many of my captions are only 1 or 2 lines, I generally start with doing them all at 40 pixels and then adjusting accordingly. Select the border to be "bottom only." c) Sharpen - if you are resizing the photos, they will probably need to be sharpened. A setting of 0.5 Radius, 1.0 Amount and 0.0 Threshold is often a reasonable starting point.  d) Watermark - select "Watermark 1" by clicking on the "Settings" button. This brings up a dialog box where you can enter your captioning data. In our case, we will be using the IPTC caption data. To do that, we enter the command "@IPTC_description@" (exactly like that without the quotes - the command is case sensitive ("IPTC_" in caps, "description" in lower case) - the underline symbol "_" is done by holding down the SHIFT key on your keyboard and pressing the "-" dash key). Using this command will make Breezebrowser use the text you put in the IPTC description box. Note that older versions of Breezebrowser used the command "@IPTC_caption@" rather than the current @IPTC_description@.Now choose the font type and size, the foreground (font) colour, the background colour and the opacity of each (keep in mind that Breezebrowser was primarily designed to add watermarks directly onto the body of a photo). Since we've already created a white background (the bottom border), you should make the background colour white, or make it transparent. Finally, choose placement. If you have multiple lines, a good placement is bottom centre, with a font alignment of left justified. Since proof generation is so fast and easy, feel free to play around with these settings until you get the effect you want. 4) Proofing - the final setting, is the type of output (usually JPEG) and if JPEG, a quality setting. If putting photos on CD, then a setting of 85 is generally very good (100 is best, but produces a large file size). If putting photos on the web, then a setting of 75 will produce a smaller file size with good quality. Check the output directory (folder) which will usually be a directory called "proofs" under the directory you are working in. You are ready to go, so now click on the "Proof" button. Once the proofing is completed, use Breezebrowser to look at the results. If you don't like what you see, go back to the original images, run the proofing option again and make any required changes. In my project, each directory contained about 200 photos. Running the proofing option with my standard settings, worked on about 80% of the photos (those with 1 or 2 lines of captioning). Some photos had more lines, so I went back to those, adjusted the border to be 60 (or more) pixels, and ran the proofing just on those photos. This worked well and was quite quick. Once the process is done, you can check what your proofs look like and make adjustments. Now, the one thing that Breezebrowser does not do is to rename these photos. So make sure to keep them in a separate folder or use a utility such as "rename-it" to rename the photos. If you do rename the photos, it is best to keep the original file name and just add a suffix (such as a -p for proof) so that these can be easily cross referenced with the originals. For example, an original might be a number such as 350-5028.jpg and the proofed version could be renamed 350-5028-p.jpg At the end of the day, you should have a full set of originals (with IPTC caption data in them), plus a set of "captioned on the photo" photos. In preparing the photos for distribution, you need to decide how you want them displayed. My personal preference is to display them as HTML documents. This has several advantages - the photos are not resized during display (an Internet browser will show the picture exactly as it is, while some photo display programs will shrink the photo down to the size of the screen), you don't need to provide a photo viewer (everyone has an Internet browser on their computer), it can be viewed on many different systems (PC, mac, UNIX, Linux, etc.) and it is an archival standard (HTML).  To create my HTML pages I will be using (you guessed it) - Breezebrowser. It is very simple to do:
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