Thesography

Hey Ben,

Thanks! That is a good idea, which previously went fleetingly through my brain. I will definitely add something like that in a future version. Another thought I had is to add a map overlay.

Will see how this goes and what other kinds of requests I get.

Thanks RowdyKittens! Good to know someone is keen :-)

Thanks so much for the feedback Alejandro!

I will definitely include language files with the next release of the plugin. I don’t know if I will make the data into a table with included CSS, but I will write a tutorial about how to use the Options page and theme CSS file to customise the look.

Hey Morten,

Thanks for the feedback.

By pop-up, do you mean as a simple title attribute (displayed by most browsers as a small yellow box) or something a bit fancier, like a hidden box that fades in with javascript when you hover over the image?

The EXIF can easily be displayed as a title attribute by inserting the shortcode into the title attribute when editing the post in HTML mode. It would look something like like:
<img src="http://www.example.com/image.jpg" alt="Example Image" title="[exif id="3520" show="all"]" width="800" height="500" class="frame size-full wp-image-3520" />

To do that you would want to change the default settings for how the exif is displayed so that there is no HTML, perhaps just separate the items with commas and a space.

Not sure what you mean about the location data: on that photo you mention it says “Sydney Harbour Bridge at night” upon hover because that’s what I named the image in the WordPress gallery (so WP gave it that as a title attribute), but I only titled the post “Bridge at night”. The location data is in the list below the photo with all the other exif; it shows the latitude and longitude and links to Google maps.

Morten — had trouble seeing what you meant about Jalbum at first, it doesn’t work properly at all in Chrome.

The file name and title stuff has nothing to do with the plugin and everything to do with how I handled the image while I was posting it. I merely gave the image a slightly more descriptive title than I gave the post, there’s no 50-50 about it, all the technical data is still in the EXIF. It would be similar to naming a post “Flowers in spring” and then showing an image with a title attribute “Cherry blossom tree”, it’s just more specific.

The markup used to display the EXIF can be edited on the Thesography Options page under “Your custom HTML”. By default it is displayed as a list; if you were to add it to the title attribute of the image you would need to remove the <ul class="exif"> and all the other HTML bits and just use a comma to separate the items. If it’s not displayed in the title attribute then any HTML format can be used.

I don’t know if I would want to include a fancy javascript display with the plugin because the behaviour and style of such a thing would vary so greatly from theme to theme and user to user, as well as introducing a bunch of accessibility questions. E.g., if the EXIF is shown in the post, but hidden and displayed with javascript, should it be in the RSS feed? And, what if someone is viewing your site on their mobile and have no hover action, should they just not be able to see the EXIF?

It would be quite simple to implement a javascript EXIF display on your own blog. As long as the EXIF is displayed successfully to begin with, you could pop a bit of jQuery in the head of your site and a bit of CSS should give you the effect you’re looking for. I’d be happy to write a tutorial on it, but I don’t want to rush into including it in the plugin itself until I’ve figured out how to make it as flexible as possible to suit most users’ needs.

Morten — I was using Chrome on mac, it’s still in the developer stage, so it can be buggy, just thought I’d mention for future reference in case you ever see a problem.

You can’t have line breaks in the title attribute; I’m afraid they’re very limited.

As long as images are supplied inside the post itself, this will work in “Aperture-land”, it seems…

As long as the images have been uploaded by WordPress, the EXIF will be accessible to Thesography. The best way to insert the Thesography code varies for different themes and different user purposes.

$exif_options = get_post_meta($post->ID, ‘_use_exif’, true);
echo display_exif($exif_options);

Which file should this go into?

If your theme uses hooks (I don’t think WooThemes do) it can go in functions.php in the theme folder to be inserted within the theme. Otherwise it needs to go straight into the theme template files in “the loop”: between while (have_posts()) : the_post(); and endwhile; (or they might use { instead of : and } instead of endwhile;). This will display the EXIF for only the first image attached to every post. For showing the EXIF for multiple images, shortcodes must be used in the post with the image ID and specifying which EXIF to use.

Did you want me to write a post about making a javascript popup?

BTW: It also displayes non-checked item “Taken” which should correlate to “Creation time” which I have not selected.

If you’ve only used the shortcodes so far, they do not utilise the default checkbox options for which EXIF fields to show (they’re designed so that they can be used for multiple images in a post and showing different sets of EXIF, if needed).

Alejandro — Thanks for the suggestion. I will think about how I might go about doing that.

Also, making a language file for the plugin is high on my list of priorities! I spent most of Friday trying to make one, but the software I tried was not working. It should be there in the next update though.

Morten — It is easy to find the image ID by inserting the image into the post, the ID is shown in the class wp-image-ID. It is an unfortunate step for those who weren’t already going to insert the image using the conventional method, I agree.

I would never suggest that anyone edit their old posts to include the shortcode. The plugin, with its limitations as it now stands, would be useful for future posts using the shortcode. Or as I’ve mentioned in the documentation, for the first image attached to old (and future) posts if you put the display_exif() function in your theme files.

The only information accessible to the javascript (since it is only active after the page loads) is whatever is in the HTML of the page. However, all of the Thesography processing, and your theme processing, happens before/while the HTML is rendered, and independently of each other. So, the theme doesn’t make the image ID available to the javascript. Meanwhile, Thesography does get the ID of the first image automatically if you insert the code in the loop, but only the first image attached to the post because if it did more than that it wouldn’t know where to place the EXIF data in the post (it knows the images are attached to the post, but doesn’t know if they are rendered in the content of the post).

I’m not sure if what you’re asking is possible. It’s entirely possible to write a theme that does what you’re asking, but it sounds like your theme might be straying far enough outside the normal workings of WordPress that I can’t externally influence it in the way you’re describing. I will keep thinking about it though.

Gavin — I’m not sure if any of the discussion with Morten above will help or process ideas for you, but in short, no. Unless you’re automatically inserting those images into the post through your theme according to the images attached to that post, then there’s no way (that I know of) to automatically add the EXIF for multiple images. The reason being that Thesography collects the EXIF data from the database according to the images attached to the post, but the user can add whatever images he wants into a post, in any order, whether they’re attached to the post or not.

In theory I suppose you could write a script that checks through the contents of the post, finds something that looks like "src="http://image.jpg" then try to match that image URL to the post meta data and get the image ID and then get the EXIF. However, that is purely hypothesis at this point, I don’t know if it would work.

Wessel — I haven’t checked Thesography with WP2.9.1 yet. I was without internet for about a month when WP2.9 and 2.9.1 conveniently came out. I will be updating the plugin and making sure it all works, but I don’t know when I’ll be doing that.
There are lots of causes for the upload to pause in the middle of crunching, including a very large image (they usually fail to crunch at all between 1 and 2MB, or smaller if it’s a poor internet connection), a server with little processing power, exceeding the server’s PHP memory limit etc.

Morten — Thanks for your response! Glad to hear it’s working, at least on some servers.

Scott — Sorry for the trouble, I don’t know why that would be. To be honest I haven’t had the chance to even upgrade my own sites yet, let alone test the plugin. A couple of people have said above that it’s running fine for them. Can you let me know what other plugins you’re running and your host stats (i.e. version of PHP, version of mySQL, operating system on server, or if you don’t know that just who the host is). It could be an incompatibility with another plugin. Is it only the admin that you can’t access, nothing else of the site goes down? Do you see any error messages? Does your host keep error logs?

Scott — Thanks for that. I have another report of issues including error messages, so hopefully I can pin the problem down, although at a cursory glance Thesography shouldn’t invoke those files in WordPress at all. I will work on the problem as soon as I can (in the morning I hope), but for now it seems Thesography 1.0.1 is only working on some WP 2.9.1 installs.

Oops! Forgot to mention that there are now localisation files in the languages directory of the plugin, so folks like Alejandro can more readily change the language of the plugin output. Check out Poedit if you want a visual editor for the file and need to create a new .mo file.