filter and using attachment meta

Thanks for your kind words and for your questions. I know it can be hard to find the right part of the MLA documentation to answer a question.

First, you wrote about “attachemnt meta with mmmw plugin “. I believe the three examples you gave are actually generated by WordPress itself as images are added to the Media Library.

You can access any of the values in the Attachment Metadata, and the specifics are in the “Field-level Substitution Parameters” section of the Documentation tab. Here is the information for the “meta” prefix value:

WordPress attachment metadata, if any, embedded in the image/audio/video file. For this category, you can code any of the field names embedded in the _wp_attachment_metadata array. The “Attachment Metadata” display in the Media/Edit Media screen will show you the names and values of these fields. Note that the fields available differ among image, audio and video attachments.

The “image_meta” portion of the attachment metadata is of particular interest. This array contains some “extended image metadata” drawn from IPTC and EXIF fields by WordPress and improved a bit. You can find more information in the Codex Function Reference/wp read image metadata. For example, to get the ISO speed rating for an image, code [+meta:image_meta.iso+].

For your examples, the values are [+meta:image_meta.credit+], [+meta:image_meta.caption+] and [+meta:image_meta.title+]. You can use these substitution parameters in an [mla_gallery] shortcode or a mapping rule. If you had another meaning for “is there anyway to pull that into mla” let me know how you want to use the values and I can give you more help.

You can use the “pdf” prefix to extract metadata from PDF documents in the same way. Have a look at the “Field-level metadata in PDF documents” section of the Documentation.

I am not quite sure what you mean by “pull from a specific folder only” and “get a folder listing“. WordPress stores all of the interesting information about Media Library items in database tables; the file system folders and file names are not useful in most applications, although the item Title is sometimes taken from the file name.

There are many ways to filter items for a given gallery display, including taxonomy terms and custom field values. MLA can map metadata into taxonomies and custom fields to make them available for filtering and sorting. Here is a link to an earlier topic with more details and examples of PDF listing techniques:

List items

I hope that gets you started on working with substitution parameters, prefix values and metadata. If you can give me more details on your application I can give you more specific guidance. Thanks for your interest in the plugin.

Thanks for your updates and all the effort you are putting into this project. You wrote:

I have to take it a step at a time because it’s complicated. But the metadata does not auto populate when i load files unless I used the mmmw plugin and click on “reload metadata” and even then it would take hours.

Otherwise it only show the filename.

There is a “map mla” but it doesn’t seem to do anything when i click it, and I would have to click it for 3000 files. Is there a shortcut to get all files to auto load the data? Ideally I would put them by ftp into the directory and do this one time. Otherwise it would be a huge nightmare.

I am confident that MLA can perform the metadata mapping you need without requiring you to use the MMWW (Media Metadata Workflow Wizard) plugin. If you can post a link to some of your images and tell me the source and destination for your mapping rules I can give you more specific guidance.

Although MLA can add values to the Attachment Metadata array you might find that taxonomies or custom fields are a better destination for many applications. They can be used for sorting and filtering, which is not possibly with values embedded in the Attachment Metadata array.

You wrote “Ideally I would put them by ftp into the directory and do this one time.” It would be much better to use the WordPress Media/Add New admin screen. There is a lot of WordPress processing that would not be done with an FTP transfer.

When I started using WordPress it took me a while to figure out the “WordPress way” of doing things, but I can tell you it is worth the effort. If you are trying to systematically load 3000 images it is a good idea to work things out with a small number of them before undertaking a mass upload.