[Plugin: NextGEN Gallery] Listing images in posts

I’m assuming WP will do the most sensible thing and ‘attach’ the images to the posts (and not vice versa). Therefore, given an image, I would think that you have to go through all posts…

But if you’re comfortable with PHP, parsing the posts shouldn’t be a problem at all. This probably isn’t something you want to do on every pageload though…

What I’m thinking of doing is creating a database table to associate NGG images with posts, and (re)populate it every time a post is saved. Then I can just query that table for whatever I might need.

That sounds sensible. It’s surprising though that there isn’t a solution, yet. Maybe you should search extensively before starting from scratch.

I have searched extensively, until my eyes were about to fall out of my head. Posted here hoping I missed something.

I started out using WP using NGG exclusively, so I’ve actually not used the default WP one. It’s my understanding, though, that it does somehow track image attachments the way I need them to be tracked, or, at least, close enough. (Going to test that out this weekend.) I wonder if that’s a planned upgrade to NGG at some point?

(When I do get it working, I’ll be happy to share my code with whoever might know a bit more about making WP plug-ins. I’ve done a few other smaller useful (for me) upgrades to NGG as well. I’m a tinkerer. I can’t help it. ??

Here’s something I just threw together that actually seems to work:

$content = get_post($post_id)->post_content;
$pattern = '/\[singlepic.*?id=([0-9]+).*?\]/';
preg_match_all($pattern, $content, $matches);
$post_images = 0;
if ($matches[1]) $post_images = join(',', $matches[1]);

That gives me (in this particular case) a comma-separated list of image IDs that I’m using in a SQL query.

I’m really too worn-out today to be trying to code, but I had some time to kill. So if anyone wants to point and laugh, at least post the fix, please. ?? Especially on the regex part, as I think I did that weirdly. But it does appear to be working correctly so far.

By the way, I have a number of planned uses for this (including my previously-mentioned putting this all in a database table idea), but right now, I’m actually using it in media-upload.php to allow me to use a checkbox to hide images I’ve already included in the post I’m editing. Quite useful when you have 40 photos in a gallery that you want to put in a post (my blog is really photo-heavy) and you only have 39 in the post and can’t for the life of you figure out which one you missed.