How to keep image captions up to date?

  • Hello everyone,

    It seems like the majority of image (gallery) plugins don’t update frontend image captions when changing the caption in the Media Library. It’s all static HTML with no link back to the original image.

    How do big websites handle this? What if you have 1000+ pages and hundreds of images used on multiple pages across the site? You’d normally want to change an image caption or other meta data from one central place, rather than finding where the image has been inserted and doing it all manually. I feel like I am missing something obvious.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

  • Just checking. Have you tried the Media Library Assistant Plugin

    Thread Starter pete3

    (@pete3)

    Thanks for the suggestion. I installed it now. It is quite overwhelming ?? I guess the basic idea is to use a short code like [mla_caption] in the frontend, instead of the actual caption. Didn’t get it to work yet.

    I was hoping for single image and gallery blocks that pull data from the Media Library when the page is rendered. It looks like that’s not common, so I wonder how big websites keep their media meta data up to date if an edit in the Media Library isn’t pushed out site wide. That could become a mess!

    Alright. I think I understand now. The MLA plugin only does bulk changes to captions within the library. But you want to bulk edit captions of images within in posts.

    Chances are you might need to build a custom solution as I haven’t come across anything similar. You’d need a plugin that figures out the ID of an image in a post and replaces its caption with that of a matching ID in the library.

    The reason images in posts have separate captions from the library is that a single image can be used in different context and have different captions.

    Media Library Assistant support might be able to give more insight.

    Thread Starter pete3

    (@pete3)

    Thanks Nigel,

    I think I have to accept that this is uncommon in WordPress. I hope future versions of WordPress and plugins will offer more options for managing large sites.

    I’d better search for a good search tool now, so I can at least find old captions quickly and then edit them manually after making a change in the Media Library.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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