Naming images

At the moment, there’s no way to name the images. Mammoth does its best to pull out alt text for each of the images, so we could base the image name on that. In the document after conversion, do the images have sensible alt text?

It’s not the alt text I need to name.

It’s the slug. The actual file name in WordPress needs a proper name (e.g. change “word-image-2” into “company-org-chart”). This is important for SEO.

I found a media renamer plugin that can change the file name based on the media’s title.

My workflow…

1. Use Mammoth to import the doc
2. In the Library give each image a proper title
3. Use the media renamer tool to update each file name

I haven’t tested if Mammoth uses the alt text in Word and passes that somewhere in the media file once in WordPress.

I could use that to set the title of the media when adding to the library, that would mean I could skip step 2.

Better yet would be if Mammoth would set the file name, or slug, so I could skip step 3 as well.

I sometimes use another media plugin that lets me replace a media file, and when it does I have the choice to update the slug. That’s two plug ins I use to change the file name.

So I know it’s possible to set the file name during upload. I haven’t looked at the WordPress APIs to know what is required. I’m just saying I know it’s possible to set the file name.

I was suggesting that we use whatever alt text is available in the document to set the filename for the image. How else would you suggest that Mammoth knows what to use for the filename?

I’m not familiar with Word’s APIs. I do use Word extensively, and would call myself an expert user.

As far as I know Word provides the following for images.

alt-text Title
alt-text Description
Captions

If you can get to the alt-text Title, then I think that’s the best option. Although the Captions are nice because I can also see them in the Word doc while editing. Alt-text Titles are hidden as far as I know.

You’ll also have to convert the alt-text Title into something that can be used as a WordPress slug (no spaces, etc). So there’s going to be some translation rules.

If it’s blank, then you use the current default (word-image-xxx).

I’d be happy with anything you come up with ??

Mammoth already uses the alt text description to set the alt text of the image, so using that to also set the filename makes sense to me, although probably limited to a certain number of characters in case of long descriptions.

limited to a certain number of characters in case of long descriptions

I would think keeping the current behavior.

Then just use the current alt-text to also define the file name as it’s being added into the media library.

Of course you have to follow the rules for a slug (no spaces, max string len, etc)

I just thought about upper or mixed case file names, which can get weird. I’d be happy if the file name was set to all lower case.

Not sure if spaces should become a dash or an underline. Personally I prefer dashes.

How about looking into this idea, and thinking about the translation of alt text to file name?

Let me know if I can help with deciding on the default rules. I’d rather avoid making this complicate with exposing the rules in the UI (yuk).

I would think keeping the current behavior.

I’m not quite sure I follow: the current behaviour is to always use the same fixed filename, which is what we want to change. Unless you thought I was suggesting changing the alt text behaviour? In which case, just to clarify, I wasn’t.

In any case, it looks like using the alt text description to set the filename would work for you, so that’s looks like the sensible option to implement. I don’t think there’s any need to use any particularly esoteric rules for generating slugs.

The latest version (1.2.0) should now set the filename based on the alt text description. Does that do the job?

dude – that is awesome!

I’ll test this with my next batch of imports. It could take another week or so, and I’m looking forward to testing this.

I have 1.2 installed, and tested this.

All images in WordPress imported with the usual word-image-x.

Both the slug (file name) and title of the image in WordPress were word-image-x. The alt text in WordPress was blank.

I used a two-page Word doc with three images. I gave each one a unique alt text title within the Word .

I tried saving the doc within Word as HTML, and verified the images were given the alt text I had defined.

Then I went back to Word, and use the alt text description field. After doing the import again, this time I found it was working as expected.

I wasn’t obvious that the alt text title is ignore, and the plugin is using the alt text description instead. I would have thought the title was the ideal source, but I can accept you’re using the description instead.