Import iView gallery with captions in gallery?
Development and Programming
I’ve noticed a couple threads here about both the gallery module and third party modules.
I have used picture galleries for many years, but I create them on my mac (iview, now owned by MS….!!!), and then upload them.
See http://www.hearth.com/gallery/
Right now, all my pics are resized manually by me, so the gallery program does not resize, simply creates thumbs and captions, etc.
There is no way I want to type 500+ captions again!
So my question is whether such a gallery (with captions and cateogory) could easily be imported into one or the other of these EE tied galleries, and whether it would be an advantage….the first advantage I can think of is that I can add pics one or a few at a time if the gallery is online, whereas now I have to do a bulk update the then upload the entire gallery.
Comments and suggestions welcome.
handyman,
I looked over the gallery pages you have and I think I get you on not wanting to retype 500+ captions over again.
How comfortable are you with PHP?
I could see you possibly importing from the flat files and folders that currently make up the galleries using some custom PHP that goes through the folders in a given directory and parses the single image and multiple image pages within for the caption and image paths which could then be imported into EE through some queries.
But it wouldn’t be something easily done if you don’t have some experience with regular expressions and reading files through PHP.
Its also not something others would be likely to be able to reuse so it would probably be a one off solution for you only.
The question is. Does the reward/advantage of having everything in the EE gallery outweigh the time (or money if you hire someone) it would take you to do it?
Jamie
Thanks, Jamie….
Remember, I don’t need to actually import from the pages themselves, but from the meta-data in the iview program! Since MANY photo storage and tagging programs use similar tags and data, the ability to import photos and some kind of associated data with them might be useful to more folks than just myself.
I will take a look at the export features of iView and see if it has a way of associating pics with some of the other field…and I will report back here soone.
Oh,
Does iView allow you to export this metadata into some sort of delimited format other than the galleries it generates?
Jamie
OK, as I thought, it can export any of the fields and associate them with the original pic name, such as: File Name Categories Caption stone12.jpg Chimney Stone Chimney on newer home - Western Ma. newport34.jpg Chimney Triangular chimney, Newport, RI cottage17.jpg Chimney Cute cottage using round stove with chimney and arch door. chimney_coproof.jpg Chimney Nice chimney (new) with copper roof sent to us by a reader who got ideas from this gallery! noho3.jpg Chimney Another beauty - massive interior brick chimney.
So, does that make it any easier? I guess I would have to see the Gallery Mysql table….
Again, this should be useful to just about anyone who uses a photo tagging program.
It’s not a big deal to me, only problem…as I mentioned, is that when I update the galleries I might add 10 pictures but then have to upload the whole 200 again…..
Certainly easier in that case.
You would need to setup EE’s gallery so it knows where the images are stored.
Then parsing that file will be much easier than going through a bunch of HTML. A little REGEX can grab the image and then work out a way to parse out the first word as the category and the rest of a line is then Caption. (Are the categories always a single word? That would simplify things considerably.)
You would then need to provide a mechanism for matching a category with the ones in EE.
It doesn’t sound too bad to me especially if you can get a nicely formated flat file to work with.
Jamie
Categories might be multiple words, but I can always parse or change them. I guess there is no harm in me installing the gallery module and then looking at it….right now I don’t think the EE tables exist for it, so I am flying quite blind…..
I was hoping for a REALLY simple solution, such as uploading the pics all into one folder, and then uploading the data file into a table….or something like that.
I’ll explore the module a bit and post back if I come up with anything that might help others.
Looking over the Mysql file and the way things are done, it would seem like the best work flow would be: (this assume entering one category at a time)
- Batch upload the files using that Hack script that does them all without user input. This would run the images through the “engine” and put the date entry in, and everything else except the caption
- Then use a PHP or Mysql (or custom EE) template to pull the captions out of an uploaded tab file IF they match with the file name. It would be easy for me to make the file names match (as per the gallery, without the extension)….
Would not be worth my while to do it right now, but just throwing it out there because it would it would seem like others could use it. If I get the “itch” to do some scripting on this, I will post the results…but chances are there are a LOT better scripters than I around these parts!
I’d love to see the results if you ever get the itch. 😊
Jamie