Otto on WordPress

Was trying to upload some photos and noticed that the captions I had set on the photos in Picasa showed up as titles in WordPress instead of as captions. Examining the core code, I found that it’s a known issue, but that fixing it in the core isn’t so easy, since WordPress has to support a number of different image editing programs and such. Different programs use the EXIF fields in different ways.

But I mostly use Picasa for photo management, so I don’t care about those other programs. So I wrote a quick plugin to fix the problem with WordPress and Picasa photos. Basically it just rejiggers the attachment when it’s added (but not when it’s edited) and puts the caption in the right place.

<?php
/**
Plugin Name: Picasa Captioner
Description: Fix up WordPress to read Picasa Captions from EXIF info properly.
Author: Otto
Author URI: http://ottodestruct.com/
**/

add_filter( 'wp_read_image_metadata', 'picasa_adjust_caption' );
function picasa_adjust_caption($meta) {
	if (empty($meta['caption']) && !empty($meta['title'])) {
		$meta['caption'] = $meta['title'];
		$meta['title'] = '';
	}
	return $meta;
}

add_action( 'add_attachment', 'picasa_adjust_attachment' );
function picasa_adjust_attachment($id) {
	$attachment = & get_post( $id, ARRAY_A );
	if ( !empty( $attachment ) ) {
		$attachment['post_excerpt'] = $attachment['post_content'];
		$attachment['post_content'] = '';
		wp_update_post($attachment);
	}
}