How to quickly update image titles across a whole collection/album

[newmikey]

So, this may not be news to most of you but I found a way to quickly prepare new descriptions for my mages offline and then have a spreadsheet concatenate SQL queries that you can run on your server (f.i. in phpMyAdmin) to bulk update your image titles in a hurry.

So what happened is that I migrated from Flickr and all of my images had ridiculous titles which didn't make any sense. Clicking every image in a Chevereto album, then clicking [Edit], changing the description and then saving the edit becomes tedious after a minute or two.

I downloaded the images table from my chevereto database and chopped off everything except for the image_id and image_title column (columns A and B in the sheet). I then added a column where I typed in a sensible description (column C) and a fourth column (D) containing the formula:

="UPDATE chlv_images SET image_title = '" & C3 & "' WHERE image_id = " & A3 & ";"

Copying the formula down for forty, 60 or more rows followed by simply typing in descriptions which matched my images resulted in something like this (I'm only showing a few rows out of more than 80).



Finally, I copied column D in its entirety into the query window in phpMyAdmin so it read:



And I ran the query (after simulating it first to ensure I had no SQL syntax errors). Instantly, my whole album view updated with the new titles on every single image after a page refresh and the new titles also show up when sharing via social networks or BBCode.

Probably trivial to most here but I thought it would be useful.

Disclaimer: PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE backup your database (or at least this table) before trying this out and ALWAYS run a query simulation before the "real thing"! I do not take responsibility for anyone messing up their whole site because of this!

 

[Rodolfo]

Hey @newmikey thank you for sharing your knowledge.

I'm sure it will help others.

 

[glennemay]

Hey @newmikey thank you for sharing your knowledge.

I'm sure it will help others.

This is great use of direct SQL queries.

@Rodolfo Is there a way something like this could be implemented into the next gen software? Allow users to edit the descriptions on photos en-mass as opposed to each individual image entry?

My users will be uploading potentially hundreds of photos at a time. Allowing them to bulk edit the descriptions should result in a more organized DB in the end. I would prefer not to have to download the tables every time and certainly would be apprehensive to provide general users with that access.

Thank you for the consideration.

 

[Rodolfo]

@Rodolfo Is there a way something like this could be implemented into the next gen software? Allow users to edit the descriptions on photos en-mass as opposed to each individual image entry?

The API will allow all kind of actions so it will be possible, but I don't know how the interface implementation will be. Ideally I want users to provide many different user interfaces, including different admin panels that can be run stand-alone the default one.

That flexibility should encourage front-end developers to craft any kind of bulk experiences based on the same API.