Modify Nextgen Gallery to Extract Picasa’s Caption

By | October 4, 2011

I use Picasa to manage my photos locally and Nextgen gallery(a wordpress plugin) as my online photo albums.

And in Picasa, captions can be added to photo’s meta tags, like this:

nextgen_gallery_pre

When upload to Nextgen gallery, I would like to have this caption to be added to the photo’s title and description. So I modified the Nextgen gallery to support this.

The modifications in Nextgen gallery plugin:

1. Modify admin/function.php:

At line number 661, replace

$alttext = empty( $meta['title'] ) ? $image->alttext : $meta['title'];

// get the caption / description field
$description = empty( $meta['caption'] ) ? $image->description : $meta['caption'];

with

if (!$alttext = $meta['title'])
    $alttext = ($meta['keywords'] . " " . $meta['camera']);

// get the caption / description field
if (!$description = $meta['caption'])
    $description = ($meta['exif_desc'] . " " . $meta['keywords'] );
else
    $description = ( $description . ' [EXIF :: ' . $meta['exif_desc'] . ']' );


if( trim($alttext) == "" || trim($alttext) == "Exif_JPEG_PICTURE" ){
    if( $meta['caption'] )
        $alttext = $meta['caption'];
    else
        $alttext = $description;
}

At line 734, add:

$meta['exif_desc'] = ($pdata->get_META('camera') . " :: " . $pdata->get_META('focal_length') .  " :: " . $pdata->get_META('shutter_speed') . " :: " . $pdata->get_META('aperture') . " :: ISO " . $pdata->get_META('iso') . " :: " . $pdata->get_META('created_timestamp'));

2. Modify lib/meta.php:

At line 237, replace:

if ($this->iptc_data[$key])
    $meta[$value] = trim(utf8_encode(implode(", ", $this->iptc_data[$key])));

with

if($this->iptc_data[$key] && $key == "2#120"){
    $meta[$value] = mb_convert_encoding(implode(", ", $this->iptc_data[$key]), 'UTF-8', 'gb2312');
}
else if($this->iptc_data[$key]){
    $meta[$value] = trim(utf8_encode(implode(", ", $this->iptc_data[$key])));
}

And the final result looks like:

nextgen_gallery_result

You may download the modified package here. (in the package, there are also some modification in the UI, you may compare the package with the original one to see the difference.)