InDesign CS5 Auto-Captioning Images without extensions

[Shawn]

I've got a catalog project were hundreds of images need to be automatically captioned with the filename.

It looks like using the Generate Caption in InDesign CS5 would be perfect for this, but when I use it and base the caption on the name, it applies the filename with the extension. I need the image name only without the .jpg or .tif extension.

I don't see an easy way to do this in the InDesign settings. I can think of a couple of workarounds involving nested styles or messing with the EXIF data in Adobe Bridge, but before going down that route--and possibly pulling something in my head--I thought I'd check to see if I'm missing something? Seems like it would be a useful option to have.

Thanks
Shawn

 

[DCurry]

You could just do a Find/Change and replace ".jpg" with nothing. You'd have to do it for each extension used, but it would not take long at all.

 

[Sherbert]

Just add the caption in bridge instead of using the file name?

 

[Lukas Engqvist]

use a GREP style making ".jpg" invisible?

 

[Shawn]

Thanks everyone for the suggestions.

I'd prefer to avoid doing a simple find and replace, since the placement isn't going to be done in house and we'd rather have something a little more automatic. Plus the images could be coming in as various formats so we'd have to do a find for .jpg, .tif, .eps, .pdf, .png, etc.

Using Bridge alone to manually change things wouldn't work, since there would be hundreds of images for each catalog. It can be part of a solution though with a script. More on that in a bit.

I'm going to present this to the client and let them choose how they want to do it.

The nested style solution is the same idea as the GREP style that Lucas brought up. I set up a character style called hidden that set the type size to 1pt, the horz scaling to 1% and the type fill to none. Then I set a Paragraph style for the caption with a nested style setting. It used the base style until the first period, then switched the next 4 characters to the hidden style. So any captions placed with this paragraph style will include the extension, but it will be invisible. This works fine for Static captions, but doesn't work for Live captioning.

The second solution came from the forums at ps-scripts.com. Credit goes to Mike Hale, he wrote a javascript which copies the file name minus the extension into the headline field in the exif data in Adobe Bridge.
<http://www.ps-scripts.com/bb/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=2406&sid=abb69282c947bc40ec1081d5c7b9a6fc>

Then you just need to use the Headline field in the caption settings instead of the name field. I have a feeling that this is the solution we'll go with. This one works as a live caption, which allows images to be moved a little more easily, since their captions will now follow them around.

Shawn