The first time I’ve heard of macros was when I first used Microsoft Excel. Macros are defined as tiny snippets of programming codes to customize and enhanced the results on a spreadsheet or to perform repetitive tasks. In our applications, even though they do a lot of complicating codes at the background to get the result, it does work in a different manner. Here we used them much as a preset programming function calls. If you are familiar with programming, a function is a set of procedures to get a result. In the context of Text Captions, macros plays in an important role in making your text captions dynamic in a way.

In the past, when we first conceived Batch It, it featured a relatively simple text caption feature. At that point, we only used it as a way to add copyright text to the photos. This works well for most circumstances even up to today. However as times goes by, our users’ needs get a little more complex and we added the ability to specify different static text captions for each photos by including a Text Caption column in the file listing.

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Over the years, we listened to your requests for something more complex which started off by including filename as part of the text caption. This was when we went back to the drawing board and reengineered how the entire Text Captioning module works which brought about the birth of Macros. We have also included macros over into Batch It Ultra’s file naming module too.

There are a number of macros available and they may differ from application to application so do refer to the user manual as to what can be used. They can also be found as the dropdown box for the Text Captions within the File Listing too.

We included the macros there so that you can select them for use. Although macros can be used on and by itself but it is not how we intended them to be. They can be used together with other macros and static text and in any combination that you want. Macros are case insensitive and we just added the tile casing so as to distinguish between the words as the only condition is that they must be spelled exactly as they are designed and cannot contain spacings in the macro name.

For instance if you want to add a text caption to include a Text that says “This Photo was taken on ” and date which will be dynamic. You can have the text caption set as This Photo was taken on [Date] and the Date will be substituted with the Date taken off the EXIF data embedded in your photos which has been added by your camera. You can make it even more complex if you want to embed the Geo Location point by saying This Photo was taken on [Date] at [GPSCoord] . Obviously the GPS Coordinates will only be added if they are embedded by your camera. Most modern cellular phones will be able to do this.

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If there are any macros that you want within the application that is not included, do drop us an email and we will do our best to include them.