I have since found a way of working that does exactly what I described in my question: for this, I need a small programme and a script.
The programme I used is called ‘Photo Metadata Export’ (in Apple’s app store), it can export a lot of types of metadata from a folder of images to an excel file, but for me in this case it’s just about the file name, description and possibly keywords.
From a folder of images, I create an excel list with the exact names of the images and the description field. There are more programmes that can do this. The beauty of this little programme is that it can also put a small thumbnail of the image in front of the name. This is easy to recognise which image the description belongs to.
The author of the issue can then put the caption of each image in the matching description field.
I then use Mars Premedia’s Photoshop script ‘Metadata from CSV’ to import the descriptions from the excel file to the metadata of the images.
Mars Premedia, by the way, has written a lot of great scripts for InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop. Most scripts are free to download, but if you get some use out of them, a voluntary contribution is asked for.
This way, I can quickly and flawlessly write descriptions to metadata that I can then easily call up in InDesign as a caption.
Maybe someone will find this useful. (I myself have no further connection with Photo Metadata Export or Mars Premedia.)
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