Add new data to mediafiles description, keeping current

Thanks for the good words – you are welcome! Thanks as well for the question. There are two ways to accomplish your goal. Both of use Content Templates, and this is a great example of their power.

First, you can use the Media/Assistant submenu Bulk Edit area. Check one or more items, pull down the Bulk Actions list and select “Edit”. In the Description field you can enter something like:

template:[+post_content+] - and yet more.

In this example, [+post_content+] is a “data source” that contains the Description for media items. You can find a complete list in the “Data Sources for Custom Field Mapping” section of the Settings/Media Library Assistant Documentation tab (read about Content Templates there, too). The “- and yet more.” is some text added to the end.

The second method is to use a template in the “Standard Fields” section of the IPTC/EXIF mapping rules. You can use the rule there to “Map All Attachments, Standard Fields Now”. Once you are done, you will probably want to delete the template to prevent it from running when new items are added to the Media Library.

The Bulk Edit area is probably better, but the choice is yours.

I hope that gets you started on using Content Templates, Bulk Edit and mapping rules to get what you want. I am marking this topic resolved, but please update it if you have any problems or further questions. Thanks for you interest in the plugin.

Thank you David! But i can’t figure out where exactly i need to place:

template:[+post_content+] – and yet more. Can you give small instruction – step by step to update all of the images description?

Thanks for responding. Here are the instructions for the “Bulk Edit” approach:

1. Log in to the Admin area and open the Media/Assistant submenu screen.
2. You might want to pull down the “Screen Options” in the upper-right corner of the screen and check the box to the left of “Description” to add that field as a table column. That way you can see what the field content before and after your update.
3. Check the box to the left of the items you want to update, or check the box above the first item to select all of the items on the page.
4. Pull down the “Bulk Edit” dropdown and select “Edit”.
5. Click the “Apply” button to the right of the “Edit” dropdown.
6. In the lower-right portion of the Bulk Edit area you will see a text box for the Description field. Enter “template:[+post_content+] – and yet more” in the text box. The [+post_content+] part of the template will copy the existing Description and make it the first part of the new value. You can replace the ” – and yet more” part of the template with the information you want to append to each description.
7. Click the “Update” button in the lower-right corner of the Bulk Edit area to make the changes.
8. If you have more than one page of items, go to the next page and repeat the above steps. You can pull down the “Screen Options” in the upper-right corner of the screen and increase the “Entries per page” setting to put more items on each page. I would not go above 50 items per page because the updates take a while and the script might time out.

If you have any problems or questions regarding the instructions, post them here. Try them out on one or two items first, just to make sure you are getting the results you want. Let me know how it works.

Thank you David – this works perfectly. You did amazing job – thank you from ALL of us! ??