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Advanced tagging

special-k Member
in General support
I am using zenphoto in a scientific context -- cataloging images of animals from a large research project with several 1000 photos (and more to come). The current tagging setup is so clunky (i.e. one has to click expand all fields and choose from a long list of tags) and does not allow for multiple images to be tagged simultaneously.

I am envisioning a page where one can choose an album or tag (or group of tags) and thumbnails are then pulled up from a query. At that point, one can just check all the images that need a certain tag and apply one to all.

Does such a 3rd party plugin exist? I was hoping someone could shed light on this before I invest time coding or hiring someone to do it for me.

thanks

Comments

  • sbillard Member
    Why don't you just tag the images before you upload them? Adobe Bridge (for instance) will do this very nicely.
  • special-k Member
    Aren't the tags part of a mysql table on zenphoto? How would embedding the tags in the image work here?
  • sbillard Member
    Because zenphoto will import the tags from the image keywords
  • special-k Member
    Thanks sbillard, that's good to know. Although I have Adobe Bridge, the assistant who will do most of the uploading will probably only have iphoto or picasa. I'm guessing keywords from those work as well?
  • acrylian Administrator, Developer
    As long as that is standard EXIF/IPTC data, yes. Best perform a test run before starting the real thing.
  • reneesanguinetti Member
    Hello,

    I am using Zenphoto version 1.2.8. I have decided to use the keywords meta tag for my pages. It works fine for the individual image and album pages, listing only the associated tags, but the index.php and all the gallery pages list EVERY keyword in their meta keywords tag. Is there a way to limit the tags on these pages? Also, I know you can change the sort order of the tags in the admin, but that doesn't seem to affect the order on the actual page when I view source. Can you manually sort the order for the meta tag of the pages?

    Thank-you!
  • kagutsuchi Member
    I don't think it would be possible to limit the tags without hacking the `html_meta_tags` plugin. The specific line that would need to be changed is 223. That line would need, however, a way to decide which tags it should show depending on how you plan to limit the tags.

    As far as sorting goes, there's currently no way to do so from that plugin (without hacking it). Out of curiosity, why would you want the meta tags sorted anyway?
  • reneesanguinetti Member
    Some theories I have read for SEO states that it is a good practice for the "specific" keyword of a page to be listed first in the list of the meta keywords tag. I have no concrete evidence this is best, but I thought if I could do this I could run a test on the theory. I wanted to limit the list (on then index page, etc.) so the keywords would reflect what the page is about and not everything on my site. But on the other hand I think Google and other search engines will truncate the list. Isn't this correct? Without having the ability to sort the tags, the associated keywords for these pages (index and galleries) will probably end up too far towards the end of the list. The way they appear now are alphabetical. Any thoughts? Thank-you!
  • kagutsuchi Member
    If I'm not mistaken, the index and gallery pages of Zenphoto don't have tags associated with them (which is why they use the tags of all the albums).

    You should be able to specify your own tags within the theme's header, however, to achieve the same effect for these two pages. If you still want to include keywords from elsewhere, it would probably be best to create a custom function for your theme using `getMetaKeywords()` from `html_meta_tags` as a template. From there, you can choose what exactly to include on these two pages and how to sort them. As I said before, the relevant line is 223.

    From what I've read, most search engines these days will not pay much attention to the meta keywords (Google in particular; Yahoo might still use them). Also, I highly doubt that the order of the keywords would matter, though I have no evidence for this. Chances are that, if keywords are taken into account, then they will be truncated at some point that is determined by the search engine itself.

    As a side comment: wouldn't it be better to use `getAllTagsUnique()` instead of `array_keys(getAllTagsCount())` in `html_meta_tags` line 223?
  • acrylian Administrator, Developer
    Yes, only albums, images, Zenpage pages and Zenpage news articles can be tagged.
    You can also of course add your meta keywords manually to the head of the theme pages and use tags functions direclty for them.

    Google indeed says explicity that it does not use meta data. If I remember correctly except the description that is displayed on the serach results. but not used for ranking. They only use the actual site's content for that.
    http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html

    We could of course add text fields to manually add meta keywords that should be used for the untagged pages. But given that they are not really important anymore I am not sure if we should do...

    Regarding the `getAllTagsUnique()` you might be right. I don't remember if that function is newer than the plugin or if it was an oversite.
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