Gallery that uses the image Title

Thanks David that’s sharpened it for me.

I don’t recommend using the Title for this purpose. There is no current MLA feature that will choose items in this way; it would take custom PHP code to remove the sequence number from the Title and query the database to find the matching items.

I will likely now take your suggestion to avoid using the title for an image in the media library and instead use an Att. tag. It would be an easy step to simply add an att. tag value of ‘caves sun desert’ for each of the images in a set which would distinguish the set from all other image sets in the media library plus it would get around the need to remove the sequence number from the Title.

It seems the title is also best avoided in case I might need to change it for my images for sorting reasons or whatever, so I’m not locked into it in the code.

Really, the Title should be unique and descriptive for each item in the Media Library.

I hope it is ok to use my outlined naming sequence because there’s no way around this for me. The images in the set are distinctly the same image but with certain variations or differences, but not enough to rename them uniquely apart. It’s a hard topic to google about but from what I have found google accepts that your site might have duplicate or very similar pages at different URLs and they identify and choose one URL as the canonical version and crawl that. Which sounds like it makes this acceptable. Other than that these images will be grouped together in the media library for me and in the order I want them presented in the mla gallery.

Whether you choose the Title, a taxonomy term or a custom field you will have to write some PHP code for your attachment.php template to extract the value from the item for that page.

I still want to use [mla_gallery] in conjunction with the new PHP code you mention, I’m assuming this is no problem? For the actual gallery display as normal and to utlise any other parameters and so on as required.

thanks,

You beauty! this works great.

You will have to handle the case where multiple tags are assigned to the item(s). You can handle this by adding a prefix, e.g., “Gallery:” to the term for composing your gallery.

Aha! I thought of this soon after I posted and was going to be the next question.

To get the correct sequence of my images i.e. Caves Sun Desert 1 as the first thumbnail in the mla gallery, Caves Sun Desert 5 as the last thumbnail etc. I need to check with you that the method I have chosen from the documentation is the orderby parameter with title attribute:

orderby="title"

This seems to work well, it must be using the number as I anticipated. Actually I note here that in my original titles I used a zero; Caves Sun Desert 01 but this causes the mla gallery on the front end to disappear so I’m taking that as a sign and will now title my images without the zero; if an image at version 10 or higher is re-ordered in the media library listing then I suppose that’s something I’ll live with.

Anyway, perhaps you might think I should use another separate att. tag for a number? add “1” for an image and it becomes the first thumbnail and so on. I also found meta_value_num (number) parameter, used with a custom field where I could insert a number for each image? But orderby="title" is looking appealing as it’s no extra work.

thanks again,

Hi David,

The ‘menu order’ field was just what I needed, I will use this from now on to order my thumbnails on the front end.

In the attachment.php template file following the PHP snippet you provided to display the mla gallery in code I have written an additional separate code:

<?php echo do_shortcode( '[mla_gallery posts_per_page=2 mla_output=paginate_links]' ); ?>

posts_per_page=2
I want to divide my gallery into pages of 2 images each. (Two images is simply a test at this stage as I have uploaded 4 images total for this gallery, it will be more like posts_per_page=10).

mla_output=paginate_links
And to display pagination controls

I am not able to get any display on the front end unfortunately. I understand that it is correct to display 1 mla gallery for the gallery itself then another mla gallery that provides pagination?

The additional (pagination) mla gallery is outside of the first mla gallery used for the display which you helped me with.

Thanks,

thanks David. I adapted my page design by re-positioning the entire MLA gallery so it’s high on the page due to the refresh action and it’s functioning fine. In doing so I realise the gallery looks better as the first element on the page rather than down lower as it has priority, presence and balance because its icons stretches and fills out over the page width nicely just below the title and header.

Also I followed your other method to get Att. Tags to display on my attachment page. Is there a recommended way to exclude a particular keyword from this tag listing? I want to remove the term for composing my gallery i.e. 'Gallery: term' as you outlined further above which I implemented, as this is a specialist att. tag for my own internal use.

thank you,

hi David,

Just wanted to ask a general question regarding the pagination and performance.

Before I learnt about your pagination, I assumed it would probably be best if I limited the number of images in my gallery to, say, 10 or 20. I thought it would be best not to have a seemingly endless rows of images both from a usability point of view (especially on a phone screen) and also a performance standpoint; I wasn’t sure if loading might be an issue.

In this circumstance if I had more than 10 or 20 images in the same ‘series’ I would create an ‘additional’ image set and gallery. This is where I had the idea of nesting a media item under a media item:

https://wordpress.org/support/topic/set-a-parent-to-another-attachment-page/

Now with pagination I can neatly divide a large gallery into sets of a certain number, likely to be 10 images per page, do I still need to consider performance? For instance is it OK to have a 40-image gallery placed into 4 pages and will this be no problem.

Could you describe how loading is handled, for instance does the system need to actually load all 40 thumbnails plus the full images before the whole web page can be viewed or in contrast does it load just thumbnails initially for each paginated page, and load each full image when the thumbnail is clicked?

Thanks,

Hi David,

I would like to add a second gallery to my attachment page that uses the same code fragment as you provided earlier:

<?php
$item_id = get_the_ID();
$tags = get_the_terms( $item_id, 'attachment_tag' );
$slug = '';
foreach ( $tags as $tag ) {
	if ( 0 === strpos( $tag->name, 'Gallery:' ) ) {
		$slug = $tag->slug;
		break;
	}
}

if ( !empty( $slug ) ) {
	echo do_shortcode( sprintf( '[mla_gallery attachment_tag="%1$s" ]', $slug ) );
}
 ?>

I have copied the fragment and pasted into a new location. This second gallery is to use the attachment tag term ‘Overlay: term’ (with term being different for each att. page gallery) therefore to the code I changed the following only:

if ( 0 === strpos( $tag->name, 'Overlay:' ) ) {

So far this second gallery is not showing up. Do I need to modify the shortcode or something else to differentiate it?

thanks!

Hello,

Please see the link below. The first MLA shortcode starts on line 155 (this gallery is the one that’s displaying successfully). The second MLA shortcode starts on line 292

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1vt080v5LMKy3bYOKznjLal4REbwy-DIT

Also, the att. tag terms I used can be seen:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1QUcSWnqHz57UPJfaV9cXV0xRqROKRgAx

i.e. the first and last ones in above screen capture. These are applied to the relevant media files

I inserted mla_debug=true as below:

[mla_gallery attachment_tag="%1$s" mla_debug=true]

This made no visible change.

Thanks,