Bulk Delete Captions

Thanks for your question. As you’ve discovered, replacing the Caption with an “empty” value requires a special action. In the “Content Templates” section of the Settings/Media Library Assistant Documentation tab you will find:

In the Media/Assistant submenu table Bulk Edit area and the IPTC/EXIF Standard Field mapping fields you can use the special template:[+empty+] value to support deleting the content of the Title, Caption, Description and ALT Text fields.

I am marking this topic resolved, but please update it if you have problems or further questions about using the special template to delete the Caption content. Thanks for your interest in the plugin.

I’m still having trouble finding where you need to put in template:[+empty=] for the caption. Sorry I find this plugin awesome however quite complicated. Any additional help in dummy speak would be awesome!

I’m still having trouble finding where you need to put in template:[+empty=] for the caption. Sorry I find this plugin awesome however quite complicated. Any additional help in dummy speak would be awesome!

You need to type in template:[+empty+] in the Caption field.

To expand on Mike’s comment, there are two ways you can use template:[+empty+] to make bulk changes to your captions.

First, you can use the Bulk Edit area on the Media/Assistant admin submenu:

1. Go to the Media/Assistant submenu.
2. Click the checkbox next to the images you want to change.
3. Select “Edit” from the “Bulk Actions” dropdown above the checkboxes and click “Apply” to open the Bulk Edit area.
4. Enter template:[+empty+] in the Caption field (right-hand column).
5. Click “Update” in the lower-right corner of the area.

Second, you can define an IPTC/EXIF mapping rule to change ALL of your items at once:

1. Go to the Settings/Media Library Assistant IPTC/EXIF tab.
2. If you want to apply the rule to new items as they are uploaded, check the “Enable IPTC/EXIF Mapping when adding new media” and “Enable IPTC/EXIF Mapping when updating media metadata” boxes.
3. Scroll down to the “Standard field mapping” section.
   Locate the “Caption” rule entry.
4. In the “IPTC Value” dropdown control leave the default “- None (select a value) -” in place.
5. In the “EXIF/Template Value” text box enter template:[+empty+].
6. In the “Priority” dropdown, select “EXIF”.
7. In the “Existing Text” dropdown, select “Replace”.
8. Scroll down to the bottom of the screen and click “Save Changes”.

Once you define the rule you can apply it to a single image, multiple images or all images:

• To map a single image, go to the Media/Assistant submenu and click the thumbnail of the image you want (or click the “Edit” rollover action) to get the Media/Edit Media screen. You can click the “Map IPTC/EXIF metadata” link to run your rules on this image, then scroll down and look through the taxonomy meta boxes to inspect the results.
• To map two or more images, go to the Media/Assistant submenu and click the checkbox next to the images you want. Then, select “Edit” from the “Bulk Actions” dropdown above the checkboxes and click “Apply” to open the Bulk Edit area. Click the “Map IPTC/EXIF metadata” button to run your rules on the selected images.
• To map all of your images, stay on the Settings/Media Library Assistant IPTC/EXIF tab and click the “Map All Attachments, Standard Fields Now” button. This may take a while.

If this is a one-time project, don’t forget to remove the mapping rule when you’re done. Remove the template from the EXIF/Template text box and set the Existing Text dropdown back to “Keep”.

I hope that gets you started on a solution for your task. If you have any problems or further questions regarding the above suggestions, post an update here and I will give you additional help.