shortcode within custom page template

Thanks for the kind words and for your question. Thanks as well for posting the source text of your shortcode and the link to your page; very helpful.

You wrote “The images are not in the order I specified …” Sorting on a custom field value has special syntax. Here’s what the “Order, Orderby” section of the Settings/Media library Assistant Documentation states:

<keyname>, meta_value, meta_value_num – Order by custom field value. Note that a meta_key=keyname must also be present in the query. For example, to sort by a custom field called “Publication Date” and display the most recent items first, code [mla_gallery meta_key=”Publication Date” orderby=meta_value order=DESC]

For your specific value this would be:

meta_key="sortorder" orderby=meta_value order=ASC

Second, you wrote “the href is not correct“. I see two possible problems with your shortcode: 1) spaces around the “=” after the mla_link_href parameter name and 2) no closing double-quote at the end of the parameter. Try writing the shortcode like this:

[mla_gallery attachment_tag="products" meta_key="sortorder" orderby=meta_value order=ASC mla_link_href="{+site_url+}/?pageslug={+image_alt+}&parent=products&title={+title+}&icon={+custom:icon+}" columns=5 mla_margin=0.25%]

If that does not give you what you want, let me know and I will investigate further.

Thanks for the good news on your progress and for the detailed description of your new approach. Thanks as well for your patience in awaiting my response while I did some experimenting with the image you gave as an example (products-radio.jpg). The “meta mapping” link seems to be broken.

The current MLA version does not provide direct access to values in the IFD0 section because it does uses the default false value for the exif_read_data $arrays parameter. I am working on a change for the next MLA version and I appreciate your bringing it to my attention. With $arrays = false, the Title and Subject values from IFD0 are being overwritten by the bad values from the WINXP section. That may be part of your problem. The UserComment value is available as {+exif:COMPUTED.UserComment+}.

The good news is your file also contains quite a lot of XMP metadata and you can use it as an alternative to the EXIF metadata to get what you want. You can try:

{+xmp:title+} or {+xmp:dc.title+}
{+xmp:subject+} or {+xmp:dc.subject+}

You can read more about accessing XMP metadata in the Documentation tab.

Your example shortcode contains orderby={+exif:ImageDescription+}. This will not work because WordPress does not support sorting by anything other than the specific values listed in the MLA Documentation tab. It is not possible to sort by data embedded in the files attached to the Media Library items. You could always map the ImageDescription to a custom field and sort on that.

I will post an update here when I have completed the MLA enhancement for direct access to the IFD0 metadata. Let me know if you need any other help in the interim.