MMWW – Media Metadata Workflow Wizard

Integrate your media metadata workflow with WordPress’s Media Library

Description

If you create lots of images, graphics, audio clips, or video clips you probably go to some trouble to put metadata (titles, copyrights, track names, dates, and all that) into them.

JPEG image files have EXIF metadata. MP3 audio clips have ID3 metadata.  PNG files have their own kind of metadata. Adobe is pushing an interoperable standard called XMP to hold metadata as well. Video files also have metadata.

If you use a production tool like Acrobat, Adobe Bridge or Audacity, you probably put this kind of metadata into your files. And then you probably rekey it when you put the files into your WordPress site.

This plugin will get you out of doing that. Now you can have that metadata transferred into the Media Library automatically when you upload your media.

You can choose to have the creation date in your media file used as the “Uploaded” date in WordPress. So, for example, your photos can be ordered in the media library in order of the date and time they were taken.

You can specify templates defining what metadata items should be used to create each WordPress attachment post’s fields: title, caption, alt text, and description.

For audio files, MMWW can automatically create the audio shortcode provided by Jetpack.  If you don’t have Jetpack, you can find that shortcode also in the Shortpack plugin. In WordPress 3.4.2 and earlier versions, MMWW provides an “Audio Player” button to do this on the media popup.  In later WordPress versions, choose Link To Media File and the shortcode will be generated for you. (The Settings page lets you turn this behavior off.)

Where to get MMWW

This plugin is available in the WordPress plugin repository at https://wordpress.org/plugins/mmww/

Install and activate this plugin in the usual way.

Metadata templates

Once the plugin is installed and activated, it will populate the text fields in your site’s attachment posts using metadata from the media files you upload.

Text fields for attachments

The attachment text files are Title, Description, Caption and Alternate Text. The Title of the attachment is also used to create the slug. The Description is free text describing the media item. The Caption is displayed underneath photos in posts. The Alternate Text is embedded in the IMG tag in the post. It serves two purposes: describing the image in textual form for people who use screen readers because they cannot see the images, and for describing the image to search engines.

Using metadata templates

Many media editor programs, such as Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, Acrobat and Audacity have ways of loading metadata into media. These usually can be found in a dialog box named “Properties,” “Image Information,” or something similar.

The settings page lets you specify the templates to use for populating the text fields. For example, you can set the Description template for an image file from a smartphone to

{description} {shutter}–{fstop} {latitude}/{longitude} {created_time}

and you’ll see some details about how, where, and when the photo was taken in your Description.

Credits

Ognjen Djuraskovic of firstsiteguide.com has generously provided Serbian and Spanish translations of MMWW. Хвала / Gracias / Thanks Ognjen!

This plugin incorporates the Zend Media Framework by Sven Vollbehr and Ryan Butterfield which they generously made available under the BSD license. It comes in handy for retrieving and decoding the ID3 tags from audio files.  See the LICENSE.txt file in this distribution.

Copyright (c) 2005-2009 Zend Technologies USA Inc.
Thanks, Sven and Ryan!