image default title

If I create a folder in albums directroy which contains a bunch of images, zen brilliantly picks them up in as an album and gives it the same name as the directory.

However, the individual images show up in the navigation top part all with the same name - which is the name/model of the camera used to take the pic ...

Is there a way to have this default just be the file name instead ?

(Using svn 5398)

Speaking of navigation - is there some way to have a navigation tree so it is simple to jump to any part of the album website ?

Soemthing like

(+) Top-1
(+) Top-2
..
where clicking on (+) opens up a subtree ... which in turn contain same thing - each album with a )+) to descend further ...

gene/
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Comments

  • Your question is not so clear, but I will try to answer it anyway.

    The nav links generally use the image title for the text. Titles are defaulted to the image name, but easily changed either by metadata in the image or by editing the data on the zenphoto back end.

    There is a menu management system as part of the 1.3.0 release which might give you what you are looking for for the navigation.
  • acrylian Administrator, Developer
    Also currently there is the separate print_album_menu plugin.
  • gjunk Member
    Sorry it wasnt clear - thanks for your help - I will try clarify :

    (1) I am using the svn trunk updated as of version 5398 which was last night.

    (2) I did a fresh install.

    (3) I copied a file tree of albums into the albums directory of the install.

    (4) the 'name' given to each image was not the filename of each image as I expected but rather the camera name/model presumably extracted from exif data.

    (5) I'd prefer it to default to the name of the file which is at least unique in the album.

    (6) I turned on the print_album_menu plugin - under options I tried with the default and with level set to 2 - in neither case did anything change on the zen album pages .. nothing at all visible (am using google-chrome on linux ... perhaps this plugin does not work when browser is linux/chrome ?)

    Thanks for guidance - gene - really trying to convert from gallery !!
  • acrylian Administrator, Developer
    (4) / (5) I have far memory that a similar issue has been reported by another user and seems related to a camera not following hte exif standard. Search the forum please. The name of an images is always its filename (the title is independend).

    (6) Not all plugins are supported by all themes as written on top of the plugins tab. You may need to add the function yourself. The Zenpage theme has support for it by default. It has nothing to do with browsers.
  • gjunk Member
    1) These are old images so may well have exif issues ... be nice if there was a nice easy global way to force the default back to filename.

    2) I am using the default zenpage theme - where should I see the album_menu displayed ? It most def appears the same with plugin on or off ... unless I am not setting something correctly.

    gene/
  • acrylian Administrator, Developer
    1) Well, the default is the filename if there is no exif data. So the fix is to adjust the exif data.

    2) The print_album_menu should be shown in the sidebar if the plugin is activated. If you enabled the menu_manager as you are using the snv you have to disable that first.
  • gjunk Member
    1) Thats a bit tedious ... nearly 2,000 images ... blech

    2) I do not have menu_manager enabled - tho turning that on made no visible impact either.

    I am beginning to suspect something is amiss here ...
  • acrylian Administrator, Developer
    Well, maybe try a reupload then. See our demo how it should look like (the gallery part in the sidebar).
  • gjunk - if the problem is the camera putting the wrong information in the EXIF header, maybe there is a firmware update for your camera to correct this? I can see how that problem would be very frustrating, but it sounds like zenphoto is doing the correct thing, but reading the incirrectly-set file data.

    You could execute a single SQL query to update the image titles by setting them to the filename wherever the current title is the camera make/model that's currently incorrectly there. That will fix up the 2,000 or so images in a couple of seconds, if that. Of course, you'd still have to take care of new images as they are added, and that's no fun.

    Does your image editing software let you bulk-edit EXIF data? You might be able to correct your images that way also.
  • gjunk Member
    Ah good ideas - I will poke around the mysql database and see what I can do ... yeh it would be nice if zen made it an option for dorked out exif data to alternatively use the filename ...

    My image editing software is gimp.

    gene/
  • gjunk Member
    I'll go find the demo and see what its supposed to look like ... You thinking I might do a fresh install with a new database (or prefix) ?
  • acrylian Administrator, Developer
    yeh it would be nice if zen made it an option for dorked out exif data to alternatively use the filename ...
    You will understand that we won't make options for things that rarely occur. You could probably use the image_filter to make a plugin that does this for you though.

    A new database should first not be necessary for a reinstall.
  • gjunk Member
    Is the menu the part on the demo on the right side bar that has

    Gallery
    Flowers ..
    Impressionists ...

    I dont have any sidebar at all!
  • acrylian Administrator, Developer
    Then you probably do not use the Zenpage theme (Zenpage plugin != Zenpage theme)
  • gjunk Member
    1) Theme is the default theme -
    "Default
    Joen Asmussen and Levi Buzolic
    Version 1.2.6, 10/20/2007
    The default theme in 4 distinct flavors. After choosing this theme you can pick the theme color by going to the Admin Options tab and changing the Theme colors option"

    2) zenpage plugin is *not* turned on.

    Plugins which are on are:
    class-video v1.3.0
    deprecated-functions
    filter-zenphoto_seo v1.3.0
    hitcounter v1.3.0
    PHPMailer v1.3.0
    print_album_menu v1.3
    user_login-out v1.3.0
    zenphoto_news v1.3.0
    zenphoto_sendmail v1.3.0

    gene
  • gjunk Member
    Also - I checked the webserver log for errors as well just in case - but I found none.

    gene
  • gjunk Member
    resounding DUH on me (feel free to pile on the DUH's :-) ... you are 100% correct .. the default theme iz different than the zenpage them .. heh heh ... ok ok .. I am blind for missing that ... i did assume the default them was the right one ... silly me ...

    Now it looks really different .. and much nicer too ;-)
  • Of course we actually have such an option. But of course, since the dorking will be situation dependent you will have to code the correction. Review the Zenphoto plugin architecture guide and pay particular attention to the filters. There is one that gets invoked when new images ar discovered that you should be able to use to correct any bad data.
  • Good idea, using a filter. OBviously coding per-camera make & model exceptions into zenphoto to accommodate bad EXIF implementation would be band-aid workaround when the problem is the camera itself - that said, it's still a pain for people who have a misbehaving camera as the main source of photos for their site.

    A custom filter would be ideal, in that it would detect the bad EXIF data and correct it seamlessly without the uploader having to worry about or remember it every time they add new photos, and would also not require hacking the core files and re-applying the hack each time a new version is released.
  • indeed, and it would even be possible to code a filter that would operate with the refresh-metadata function and correct previously uploaded images.
  • gjunk Member
    OK I will look into this on the weekend ... thanks for suggestions ... tho I think software should be strict in what it outputs and flexible and forgiving in what it accepts as inputs...
  • Ok, what would you like to be different. Your camera is not following standards. Zenphoto has imported what it said was the title. You can change that if you wish.

    Seems you pretty much have your head where the sun don't shine.
  • gjunk Member
    sun dont shine ? wow ... thats harsh.

    What I'd suggest is an option in zen to allow the default title to be either the exif data or the filename or something else maybe a counter for that album with a root specified by user ..

    yeh it would be nice if all digital images had the exif data you expect .. but it doesn't ...
  • acrylian Administrator, Developer
    Don't take that as too harsh but sbillard told you what to do... Again, Zenphoto is following the standards specified in the EXIF specifications. If a camera does not follow it can't be really our problem. Especially if we can't know every model out there and what it might do different. Therefore we have a plugin/filter system for users to do what they might specially need.

    So feel free to write a plugin for your quite rare purpose and make it available for all users that might need it. Maybe you could also write a EXIF maker (zp-core/EXIF/makers) for it. We have really rarely reports about this, I can only think of two so far.
  • gjunk Member
    I have thick skin :-)

    Discussion is healthy for making things better - or me understanding better and things staying the same - either way - its good progress!

    I still think making a simple option for users to choose something other than the exif:ImageDescription field could be useful for some zen users.

    They can all be changed within zen so there is no missing functionality - only convenience.

    In my case, I'll write a short standalone script to modify all the exif:ImageDescription data which are bad - and just apply it as needed.

    Thanks for making zen .. its pretty nice!
  • gjunk Member
    >> Maybe you could also write a EXIF maker (zp-core/EXIF/makers)

    I have not had a chance to look at this - but I wonder if there is some way to leverage the rather large amount of work that was done by exiftool team (http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool) ?

    Aside: ImageMagick is advertised as supported in 1.3.x .. is this support in the current svn ?

    gene/
  • Imagemagik is in the SVN.
    It would be a bad idea to make the field useage selectable. This is really a camera specific issue and should be handled either by a maker tool for the camera or a filter as we have already suggested.
  • acrylian Administrator, Developer
    Regarding exiftool: It seems to be a Perl libary you have to install on your server yourself. Therefore is would not really be an option since most users have shared hosting and probably not even the knowledge to do so. Therefore we have the Exifer libary which does not require that.

    If you know Perl (I don't) you could of course try to adapt something.
  • To make the filter plugin helpful to other people with misbehaving cameras, I would suggest allowing the string to search for in the "Title" field customizable, as a misbehaving camera such as yours will put a predictable vlaue there (in your case, the make/model). Then allow the user to either select which other EXIF field to use instead (drop-down list), or use the filename.

    In order to know which field to use, the user would have to look at one of the photos, then view the EXIF data to see which field name actually contains the title.

    Presumably the filter would do its magic whenever it came across an image containing the specified search string as the title, and would therefore process already-uploaded images or future images.

    The option to actually update the EXIF metadata in the file, if implemented, should be optional. That does risk data corruption / loss if the user makes a mistake, whereas not updating the EXIF metadata would not have that effect. If updating the image file itself is desired, then this can already be done by any number of graphics utilities.

    Just my $0.02!
  • There are three filters that can be used for this:
    `new_image` -- invoked only when an image is newly discovered (that is was not previously in the database.
    `image_refresh` -- which is called during a metadata refresh
    and
    `image_instantiate` -- invoked whenever an image is instantiated.
    I would suspect that the first two are the proper ones to use for this.

    If the camera is using non-standard fields to store needed metadata then the maker script will really need to be made/modified as Zenphoto will not attempt to retireve the non-standard fields.

    Also updating the metadata in the original image is not possible with the GD library. So it would be dependent on a graphics library that provides such support.
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