As you may have read, I’ve started to extend my website to contain a much larger selection of my photographs. (If you’re not a programmer, then feel free to stop reading here and just step over to take a look at them.)
The main hurdle which puts me off publishing photos is the administration of getting them online. I’ve been pushing photos to Flickr and 500px (as well as Facebook) directly from Lightroom for a good few years now, which makes the process a lot quicker and simpler.
My account at Picfair is also populated straight from Lightroom using the FTP access they launched a while back. The files loaded in via FTP are published automatically if all of the required meta data is complete, so that I don’t need to do anything at Picfair’s site.
This solution reminded me of some PHP code I worked on four years ago, but never completed. I, too, wanted to push photos to an FTP server and then have WordPress read them in, create posts automatically, and publish them on my own site if certain criteria were met. That’s the code I finished in early September; currently as standalone PHP scripts, but destined to become a WordPress plugin.
The script regularly reads the appropriate source directory on the FTP server into which I put the photos and decides what action to take. The photos, once validated, are re-located on the server according to the file creation date stored in the EXIF data and then are added to WordPress as Attachments. The new WordPress custom posts are then extended with some custom meta data – EXIF, location etc – and published automatically if all is well.
So whenever I have edited a batch of photos, I can simply add the appropriate tags, set the geographic location, and push them to my FTP server. WordPress handles the rest. Visitors and people following along via RSS feeds get to see my new photos without me even having to log in to my WordPress account.
Leave a Reply