How can I extract the captions from Facebook albums?

Question

Is it possible to extract caption information from individual pictures from a facebook album ?

My workflow has been to upload pictures to a facebook albums (like this https://www.facebook.com/iProbe/photos/a.10151639365624397.1073741828.127247604396/10151639368094397/?type=3&theater) and manually add captions to individual pictures - some have captions some don't.

I now want to take those captions and repurpose them for import into Lightroom.

Is there anyway for me to avoid having to retype the captions one by one manually ?

I have heard of facebook exporters, but unfortunately from my experience with LR there isn't a straightforward way of doing this. Aperture on the otherhand has a "sync" function that allows you to view information from Facebook photos. The flip side is that software changes all the time and soon this will probably be possible (if it isn't already). What version of LR are you using? — James, Dec 3, 2014 at 22:59
This question appears to be off-topic because it is about pulling content off a web site about a photo and not really about photography. — chuqui, Dec 4, 2014 at 2:27
Yeah I can see the off-topic argument, but from a practical point of view, if you're a photographer who has put a lot of work into capturing your photos on Facebook, it's a reasonable thing to want to do. — mattdm, Dec 4, 2014 at 3:51
Thanks for feedback. I have not yet used LR but willing to get latest version / Creative Cloud version if that helps... Also happy to look at facebook exporters if it can ultimately lead to what I want... — Julie S., Dec 4, 2014 at 22:28

Phil · Accepted Answer · 2014-12-06 12:12:45Z

2

The Facebook Graph API looks like it should do the trick, or at least extract the captions for you.

I don't have any experience with this particular API, but full documentation is there, and it looks like you can obtain captions (name):

It looks like the easiest way to get going is to use the HTTP explorer:

answered Dec 6, 2014 at 11:58

Phil

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\$\begingroup\$ This only seems to answer half the problem: how do you get the captions into Lightroom once you've got them out of Facebook? \$\endgroup\$
– Philip Kendall ♦
Dec 6, 2014 at 14:30
\$\begingroup\$ One option would be, if the images are of a high enough quality on Facebook, would be to download the images and captions and re-import to Lightroom in their entirety. The other might be to manually paste the captions in depending on the number, which will at least be less time consuming than extracting all the captions manually as well! \$\endgroup\$
– Phil
Dec 6, 2014 at 16:51

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