Adding text labels and metadata to photographs

[Michael_Schievelbein]

I am finally sitting down and working on converting my tens of thousands of paper photos over to digital format.
I am a genealogist and have been collecting family photos for over 40 years.
I have two needs and I am looking for one or two tools that will enable me to do this the easiest.
1) I need to add a white border only on the bottom of each photograph and then be able to add a label to the photo.
The length of the label will vary by the number of people in the photo and other information, an example would be:
"John and Jill Smith at DisneyWorld 1993-06-15"
I have tried Gimp and Pinta, but both of them make you resize the canvas, then pick a font size and then type your label.
This method is very hit and miss, as I end up resizing the text or canvas many time to make it all fit.
2) I then need to enter this same information into the meta data for sorting purposes.

Let me know if anybody knows of a tutorial that shows how to do all of this and I can work off from that.

THANKS

[SeijiSensei]

Your needs are pretty specific so I doubt you'll find a generalized tutorial.

You might take a look at Imagemagick, a command-line image tool. Being a command-line program it is scriptable. The primary command is called "convert," and it has many, many options. Here is a tutorial.

Imagemagick is available from the Ubuntu repositories.

[robert shearer]

You could try Mashup.....
http://www.kornelix.com/mashup.html
ubuntu deb package here....
http://www.kornelix.com/packages.html
While it is described as a montage app there seems no reason why you could not use just one picture and drag its dimensions to leave a white space at the bottom and then use the text tool to add your caption.

Mashup has some quirks but if you select your image/text then click anywhere on the canvas and drag it's edges to enlarge/reduce and the whole image/text item to place.
Text size, font, and background colour can be chosen.

[oldfred]

Another Fred with many scripts for imagemagick
http://www.fmwconcepts.com/imagemagick/index.php

click on any name and scroll down to see example.

[Michael_Schievelbein]

Thanks for the suggestions, I will try these, as well as DigiKam, KolourPaint and FotoXX that people emailed me to try.