With my rather large 30″ monitors, and the seeming tiny fonts in Lightroom, I was frustrated with not being able to see my caption and keywords well enough to mitigate a multitude of typos. Not to exclusively blame my poor typing on small fonts, but it makes a notable difference. So I thought I’d share my solution (although a little clunky) in addressing these two subjects.
FONT SIZE
Thanks to Jeffrey’s Lightroom Configuration Manager, I was able to tweak/customize the size of the fonts along with the size of the metadata panel width. The online configure panel lets you designate the preferred font size for each specific meta data area and then it generates at .txt file that your put in the appropriately directory as described in the directions. (One note about that, if you are using Windows and you are supposed to put the file in the EN folder (for English), but can’t find it in the directory, just make a folder titled EN and then drop in the file).
SPELLCHECKING
I don’t know about you but I end up with many spelling errors in my Headlines, Titles, and Caption fields, and I use a bit of a work around at this point to correct that. (I know MAC has an OS based spellchecker but Windows does not at this time offer that–Come on Lightroom 4, bring us spell checking!).
What I do is export a text file of the Caption and Headline information from Media Expressions, a hideously bad program no longer supported by Microsoft but it does offer text exports in a pretty good fashion. (this is the only thing I do with that program now). Then I open that file in Word and run spell check on it. When I come across a misspelled word, I search for that word in the LR metadata text search field, and make the corrections in the necessary file(s). You can export a .txt file from Lightroom using a plugin from Photographer’s Toolbox, but it also requires the export of the image itself, and that can take a long time if you are dealing with many files. For now, my method is acceptable, although a little cumbersome. At least the images that will appear on my new website will be free of many, but perhaps not all, embarrassing spelling errors!
If anyone uses another method for this, please share.
