yassermkali

Hi David,

Thank you for the reply and advice.

MLA is a very robust, sophisticated plugin that contains many features and functionality, each of which can be a full standalone plugin by itself. It gives the idea that you are a highly intelligent person, way above the average developer.

Personally, I don’t use the Gallery, Tag Cloud etc features. However, I am completely dependent on MLA as a Media Management System. The ability to classify and arrange media by categories and tags and being able to search and filter the media accordingly is a very unique strength of MLA; especially given that chaotic way WP dumps all media into one upload folder without any logical structure.

So, once again, thank you for an excellent work.

There are several WP and WC plugins for import/export of posts, products, or even an entire website. Personally, when it comes to bulk data migration, I bypass WP altogether and just download data records directly from the MySQL database.

However, none of those plugins can import/export media only. And even if they do treat media as special type of “post”, the metadata and classification done by MLA is lost in the transmission.

My PHP is not very good, and while a Custom Plugin is definitely the way to go, I have no idea how to do that.

Which brings a suggestion:

Since you already have all the knowledge and expertise and maybe 95% of the code, it would be great if you spin-off a completely new and independent plugin, and maybe call it “Advanced Media Management”. It need not include the Gallery short codes etc, and just focus only on media management and organization:

1) Bulk or individual upload/download of media from any source to WP: from local or remote, a url, a CDN, the cloud, or even just media that has been previously transferred using FTP.

2) Freedom of choice as to where media is stored, within or outside the upload folder, and even having some directory structure so that each type or class of media can have its own folder.

3) Bulk upload/download of media metadata (captions, Alt Text, att. categories, att tags and other taxonomies) from a CSV located anywhere, or extracted from APTC/EXIF included in the media file. Along with mapping those data to corresponding WP fields.

Most of this is already available in MLA.

You may even get bolder and assert that media is not really a “post” and should not be stored in a post or post-meta table. Inclusion of media in WP seems to be an afterthought which is not well managed yet.

Maybe a separate “media” table in the WP database, dedicated to media and its metadata.

I can assure you that such a plugin (which you already have most of it) will rank very highly among WP plugins.

As to my particular case, and due to urgency–I can’t believe I am doing this– I have to resort to a browser automation plugin called iMacros, which reads the metadata from the CSV file, then fill it one by one into the MLA fields inside my browser, as if filled manually by a human being. Kind of manual data entry but faster than by humans!

Best Regards,

Joe