Thanks for the kind words and for your question. Thanks as ell for the detailed description of your application goals.
The Media/Assistant “Title/Name” column is, as you noted, a combination of two separate WordPress fields. If you click on the “Screen Options” tab in the upper right corner of the screen you will see that Title and Name are available as individual columns if you prefer that.
You asked “every field seems to be available for search and replace EXCEPT this field. Is there a reason?” I have a different answer for “search” and “replace”.
For “search”, note that both of these fields are available in the “Search Media” area at the upper right of the submenu table. I assume you’d like them to also be clickable links in the body of the submenu table, like the “ALT Text” column; is that right? When I developed the Media/Assistant screen I assumed that these fields contained unique values and thus a clickable link wouldn’t be very useful. I could make the columns searchable by click if that’s important for your application.
For “replace”, note that you can replace both of these fields in the Quick Edit area for a single item. You can also replace the Title field in the Bulk Edit area. I did not provide for Bulk Edit of the Name field because this must be unique, i.e., different for every item, and that does not seem consistent with the common use of the Bulk Edit area. If you have a specific use case that makes sense, give me more details and I will investigate further.
The Name (or Slug) field is not usually displayed as it is intended for internal use, e.g., in a URL. I haven’t looked at NextGen Gallery in quite a while; are you sure it uses Name and not Title (or Caption/Excerpt)?
I hope that gives you a better idea of how MLA uses the Title and Name fields on the Media/Assistant submenu screen. I will leave this topic unresolved until I hear back from you with more information about your application and needs. Thanks for your interest in the plugin.
Hi David,
Thanks for your quick and detailed response. I understand about the difference in fields now. The reason I need to do a bulk update of the name field is because, as described above, the use case is that unfortunately NextGen gallery, when importing images into a gallery, is taking the data in the “name” field to populate its “title” field. I agree, this is very bad design. And it’s why I’m trying to use MLA to rectify the situation. Manually updating the name field one by one is not a solution, as I can also just achieve that result by manually updating the ‘title’ field brought into NextGen one by one.
But this is impractical when you are working with many galleries all with hundreds of images. You can imagine it is not fun manually updating, even pasting, a result into hundreds of fields.
I can confirm NextGen is doing this as I’ve tested multiple imports of media – it was always getting this bad technical ‘filename’. So I originally got MLA to do a bulk update of the “title” field BEFORE importing with NextGen – imagine my surprise when, after updating ALL the title fields using MLA search and replace to a nice and friendly title, that an import with NextGen STILL had the ugly technical name inserted into it’s title field – various tests show that it has to be grabbing the data from the Name field to populate this field on import to it’s gallery. I’ve submitted a ticket to them and get vague answers on whether it’s acting by design or not. If by design, its bad design – why would you want to populate your title field from a field, that as you say, is supposed to be internal use and isn’t editable?
While waiting for an unlikely fix from them, that is why we are turning to MLA for a solution to bulk update the Name field before importing to NextGen so that I don’t have to manually update hundreds of fileds with a pretty title.
Ideas?
Thanks for your update with the additional information. If you can construct a Content Template that will populate the Name field to your satisfaction I suggest using a IPTC/EXIF mapping rule as a potential solution. You can find a good example of that approach in this earlier topic:
Bulk Edit: Title, Alt Tag, descripion and so on broken on &
You might be able to use a Content Template and the different ways of selecting items for mapping to finish the job. If you need more control you can use the hooks MLA provides to add a bit of PHP code to any step in the mapping process for more control over the actions taken. Here’s an earlier topic that outlines adding a small custom plugin to the application:
Edit titles
I will leave this topic unresolved in case you have any problems or further questions regarding the above suggestions.
It has been a month since my last post in this topic. I hope my suggestions were helpful and have found a solution that works for your application.
I am marking this topic resolved, but please update it if you need any more assistance with Bulk Editing in MLA.
