PhotoQ is a WordPress plugin that turns your blog into a photoblog. If you are a photo enthusiast or simply have a lot of pictures to post, PhotoQ is your ideal companion. With PhotoQ you can mass upload several photos at the same time thanks to its batch image upload functionality. PhotoQ places uploaded photos in a queue which gives you a convenient way to manage photos to be posted. The plugin then gives you the possibility to have the top of the queue automatically posted at a given interval.

PhotoQ was designed to automate and simplify your photo posting process as much as possible. It takes away the hassle of browsing uploaded image files and embedding them into posts: You simply upload your photo to the queue and enter desired information about the photo. PhotoQ then automatically generates the post based on this information. PhotoQ is also able to automatically generate custom field content required by your theme: Gone are the days when you had to remember special post formatting instructions when publishing your photo posts. PhotoQ is compatible with virtually any WordPress theme. For your convenience it comes already bundled with configuration presets for some of the more popular photo centric themes.

To make a long story short, “WordPress + PhotoQ = Photoblog”. In addition to what is described above, PhotoQ also includes EXIF support, watermarking, batch editing and multiple image sizes.

An example of a photoblog running on Wordpress and PhotoQ can be found at http://www.whoismanu.com.

Feature List

• Convenient queue-based photo management
• Bulk uploading of photos to your photoblog
• Hassle-free, fully automated posting of photo posts
• Integrates with virtually any existing theme (new)
• Zero-configuration presets for some of the most popular photo centric themes (new)
• Compatible with WPMU (new)
• Advanced Support for EXIF metadata, automatic generation of post tags from EXIF data
• Photo Watermarking to protect your photos
• Possibility to add custom metadata to photo posts
• Automatic generation of thumbnails and alternative image sizes
• Future-proof thanks to automatic updating of all posted photos with only a few clicks
• Automatic posting through cronjobs
• Integration with Lightbox, Shutter Reloaded and similar libraries/plugins
• Available in several languages through i18n support

Screenshots

Requirements

PhotoQ 1.8 requires at least WordPress 2.8.1. PhotoQ 1.8 has been tested successfully up to WordPress 2.8.6. As of version 1.8.3, PhotoQ also works with WPMU. While most of PhotoQ’s features work in exactly the same way under WordPress and WPMU, there still are a few differences that are described in the WPMU section of this documentation.

If you insist in using an older WordPress version, please look for older PhotoQ versions that are compatible. Note however that I stopped developing the old branches, so there will be no updates/support in this case.

PhotoQ 1.8 requires a web browser with at least Flash Player 9 installed and has been successfully tested under Firefox 3 and Safari under MacOSX; Firefox 3 under Windows XP. There is, however, no reason to believe it won’t also work with other common combinations. It would be nice if the first people who test it with other browser/platform combinations could drop me a line or post a short comment. This would allow me to extend this compatibility list.

PhotoQ has been tested with both, PHP4 and PHP5 (Note that PHP4 support will likely be dropped in the near future). At the moment, PhotoQ only runs on web servers with PHP safe_mode turned off. If your web hosting provider has safe_mode turned on you can try to ask them to turn it of. Most web hosting providers will disable safe_mode for your web page on request. In addition, PhotoQ needs either GD or ImageMagick to be present on the server for image manipulation.

Installation

1. Get the latest version of the PhotoQ Wordpress Photoblog Plugin.
2. Unzip the downloaded file, you should end up with a folder called “photoq-photoblog-plugin”.
3. Upload the “photoq-photoblog-plugin” folder to your “plugin” directory (wp-content/plugins).
4. If you plan to use the automatic posting capability, move the file “photoq-photoblog-plugin/wimpq-cronpost.php” to the same directory as your wp-config.php file.
5. You now have to setup a directory on your web server where your image files will be stored (called “imgdir” directory from here on). By default this is the directory “wp-content”. If you do not stick to the default one you have to create your directory now.
6. Make sure that the file permissions of the “imgdir” directory are such that the plugin is allowed to write to it (otherwise, uploaded photos cannot be stored).
7. PhotoQ also needs a “cache” directory to store temporary files. This is the directory
   ‘wp-content/photoQCache’. If PhotoQ has the permissions to write to ‘wp-content’ the “cache directory will be created automatically. Otherwise you have to create the ‘photoQCache’ directory now and make sure that the file permissions are such that the plugin is allowed to write to it.
8. If your web hosting provider enabled the mod_security Apache module on your web server, you need to add the following directives to your .htaccess file in order for batch image uploads to work: <IfModule mod_security.c>
SecFilterEngine Off
SecFilterScanPOST Off
</IfModule> See the Troubleshooting section for more information.
9. You are almost done. Just go to the “Plugins” Wordpress admin panel and activate the Photoq plugin.

Upgrading

If you use PhotoQ in combination with the iQ2 Photoblog Theme, please upgrade iQ2 to the latest version before upgrading PhotoQ. If you don’t it may happen that, PhotoQ cannot be activated while the old iQ2 theme is running.

If you upgrade from a version prior to 1.5.2, please read the instructions in the post about PhotoQ version 1.5.2. Note that as of PhotoQ 1.6.5 upgrading functions are under “Settings->PhotoQ->Maintenance”.

Using PhotoQ – The Basics

Now that you successfully installed PhotoQ, you are ready to go. First you need to setup some of PhotoQ’s settings:

1. In the “Settings” panel of the WordPress Administration you should now have a subpanel labeled “PhotoQ”. Go there.
2. If you did not stick to the default “imgdir” during installation, you need to specify your choice under “Further Options->Image Directory”.
3. If you missed anything during installation or if your web server is missing some requirements you will see a warning at the top. The warning is there for a reason, so if you see it please try to fix it before going on ;-)

Next, you need to setup PhotoQ to work with your theme. In particular, PhotoQ needs to now what image sizes it should automatically create and how these should be displayed in your theme. If the theme you are using boasts a PhotoQ preset there is nothing simpler than that:

1. If the theme preset is bundled with PhotoQ go to step 4 (see “More on Views and Themes” for a list of themes with bundled preset).
2. Create a folder named “myPhotoQPresets” inside “wp-content” (make sure PhotoQ has read permissions on the content of this folder).
3. Place the preset file in the “myPhotoQPresets” folder.
4. Select your theme in the drop-down list under “Settings->PhotoQ->Auto Configuration” and hit “Load Theme Preset”.
5. That’s it, you can go to the fun part below and start to fill your photo queue.

If your theme does not yet have a preset, or if you want to customize your theme, here are the basics for setting up the theme display related settings of PhotoQ:

1. For every photo you post, PhotoQ can automatically generate alternative image sizes. Per default it generates two image sizes called “thumbnail” and “main” in addition to the “original” photo. With the “Image Sizes” option you specify their respective dimensions as well as the desired image quality. Unless you decide to crop the photo PhotoQ always keeps the proportions of the generated image sizes the same as in the original photo. Also note that PhotoQ will not generate images bigger than the original. To fit in with a wide range of photoblog templates, PhotoQ gives you three possibilities to define dimensions:
   • “Maximum Dimensions”: you define a rectangle of maximum width and maximum height. Whatever constraint is met first determines the value of the other dimension. If you check the “crop” checkbox, the proportions of the original image are not kept but the photo is cropped to the exact width and height given.
   • “Smallest Side”: you fix the smallest side of the thumbnail to some value and have PhotoQ adapt the other side accordingly.
   • “Landscape Width”: you fix a maximal width. If your thumbnails orientation is “landscape”, it will have this width. If your thumbnails orientation is “portrait”, its height will be adjusted such that it matches the height of a photo with “landscape” orientation.
   • “Original Size”: the photo is not resized.
2. If you think that the three provided image sizes “original”, “thumbnail” and “main” are not enough for you, you can add further image sizes by entering a name under “Name of new image size” and clicking on “Add Image Size”.
3. If you are all confused now, I suggest that you leave the default options for now and play with the other options later. Also forget about the “Watermark” and “Hide original folder” options for now, they will be explained later.
4. PhotoQ uses the two built-in WordPress template tags the_content and the_excerpt, that are also present in any regular WordPress post. Under “Views” you tell PhotoQ what to place in the content part of a post and what to place in the excerpt. For now we stick to the “Single Photo” option. The dropdown menus show the image sizes that are available and that we defined in the steps before. I suggest that for now you choose “main” for the_content and “thumbnail” for the_excerpt to place your main image in the content part and a smaller thumbnail version in the_excerpt. All the options are described in the “More on Views and Themes” section of this post.
5. In the section for the_content you have an option to “Include photo description in post content”. If you check this option, the description of the photo is included in the content part of the post, just after the photo. The description is then placed in a <p> tag with class name “photoQDescr” to allow for easy styling via CSS. If you do not check this option, the description is only placed in a custom field with name “photoQDescr”. In short: if you do not know how to or do not want to tweak themes, check this option. If you know how to access a custom field from a theme and want greater flexibility, don’t check this option.
6. “Further Options->Enable Batch Uploads”: Allows you to toggle the batch upload capability on and off.
7. Skip the other options for now and click on “Save Changes” to, well, save the changes you made so far.
8. Note that whenever you change a setting that affects the way a photo post looks (e.g. changing an image size, changing a view, changing the watermark), PhotoQ will update all previously posted photos to maintain a consistent look throughout your blog. Depending on the settings you changed, the number and size of your photos (”do I really need to upload a twelve megapixel original photo to my blog? wouldn’t a downsized version do the job as well?”), this update process may take a while. So once you click on “Save Changes”, do not interrupt the process, rebuilding all your photos might take a while. If a photo post does not get rebuilt properly, you can rebuild it manually by clicking “Rebuild” in the “PhotoQActions” column under “Posts->Edit”.

Now comes the fun part, you are ready to manage your photo queue:

1. In the “Posts” panel of the Wordpress Administration you should now have a subpanel labeled “PhotoQ”. Go there.
2. As you have not yet uploaded any photos the queue is empty. To upload a photo click the button “Add photo to queue”.
3. I think that the upload process is pretty self-explanatory. If you have batch uploads enabled, click on “Select photos…”. You can then choose several photos (via the standard cmd-click on MacOSX and ctrl-click on Windows) in the “Select Files” dialog box that pops up. The selected photos are queued for mass upload. Once the dialog box is closed, uploading starts automatically. If you have batch uploads disabled, the process is similar only that you choose the file to upload via the “Browse” button.
4. Once the upload is completed you are presented with a panel where you can enter information that is common to all the photos you just uploaded. This batch editing is especially useful for entering tags and categories. Once you entered the common information (if any) click on the “Enter Info” button.
5. You now get the chance to add information that is specific to a single photo. Choose the categories for the photo, add a title, a short description and some tags if you want. If the title is too long you might want to enter a shorter slug. Sometimes it is nice to see a photo in detail when entering information about it. PhotoQ easily allows this: if you click on a thumbnail, the corresponding photo will open in all its beauty in a new window. Once you entered the desired information, hit “Save Batch Info”. Don’t worry all the information can still be changed at a later stage.
6. If everything went smoothly, you should now see the photos you just uploaded in the queue. You can add other photo to the queue if you like.
7. Each entry in the queue can be edited by clicking on “Edit”. This gives you the possibility to alter all the fields.
8. Entries in the queue can be easily reordered via drag-and-drop.
9. You can remove photos from the queue by clicking on “Delete”.
10. To publish the photo at the top of your queue to your photoblog, hit “Post top of queue”. PhotoQ then automatically generates a post according to your settings and the information you entered.
11. The entry at the top of your queue should now be removed from the queue and appear as a new post on your photoblog.
12. Check the result directly on your photoblog or in the “Posts->Edit” section of the WordPress Administration panel.
13. Published posts can be edited through the standard WordPress post editing. There you also have the possibility to replace a published photo by uploading a new one.
14. PhotoQ also has a dashboard widget that shows you the status of your queue at a glance.

More on Views and Themes

The laziest option when it comes to WordPress themes for PhotoQ is to use a theme that has a corresponding PhotoQ preset and to setup PhotoQ via the auto-configuration option described above. The following popular themes have presets that are already bundled with PhotoQ (Are you a theme author and would you like to see your theme in this list? Read on here.):

AutoFocus Click! Elegant Grunge Fotolog Grace iQ2

Linquist Photo Blog Sharpfolio Spotless Viewport Zack 990

The rest of this section explains how to use PhotoQ with any existing theme and what you need to know should you decide to build your own. PhotoQ only relies on custom fields and standard WordPress template tags like the_content and the_excerpt. It should therefore not be too difficult to use virtually any WordPress theme with PhotoQ. In almost all cases you should not even have to adapt the theme at all, just choosing the correct PhotoQ settings should be enough.With the Views Setting (under “Settings->PhotoQ->Views”), you define which image size and what information PhotoQ places in the content part and what it places in the excerpt part of a post (we’ll call content and excerpt views from here on).

In addtion to the default “content” and “excerpt” views, you can define your own custom views by entering a name for the view to be created and hitting “Add new” in the Views settings.  In your theme you can then use the the_content and the_excerpt template tags to show the respective default view. Information placed in your custom views is added to a custom field with the same name as the view. To display custom views in your theme, you thus display the corresponding custom field. We are now going to have a look at the different view options:

• “Empty, don’t manage” (content and excerpt only): Pretty self-explanatory, tells PhotoQ to not put anything in the corresponding view.
• “Single Photo”: A single photo is placed in the view. You choose the image size to be used from the drop-down menu. The corresponding <img> tag has the CSS class attribute “PhotoQImg”.
• “Image Link”: Instead of a single photo, an image link is displayed. With the drop-down menus you choose the image size that is displayed on the link as well as the target image it links to. This allows for integration with libraries like Lightbox that show JavaScript pop-up images. Just install, e.g., the Shutter Reloaded plugin, check this option and see what happens. You can specify what special attributes that are needed by the JavaScript library should be added to the link. The default option works for Lightbox and Shutter Reloaded. The <img> tag inside the link has CSS class “photoQLinkImg”.
• “Freeform”: This is the most powerful option, giving you complete control over how you want to format your view. You can define whatever HTML code you would like to have displayed in the view. PhotoQ also defines a list of placeholders (shorttags) that you can add:
  • [title]: is expanded to the title of the post
  • [descr]: is expanded to the photo description
  • [exif]: the EXIF information associated to the photo formatted according to the EXIF formatting options.
  • [imgUrl|sizeName]: the URL of the photo. You additionally have to specify which image size you want the URL of. E.g. [imgUrl|main] to get the URL of the original photo.
  • [imgPath|sizeName]: the path to the photo on the webserver.
  • [imgWidth|sizeName]: the width of the photo.
  • [imgHeight|sizeName]: the height of the photo.
  • One shorttag with the same name as the field for every PhotoQ Meta Field that you defined.

  As an example, assume you have a view called “mainLink” that uses the following freeform option: <a href=”[imgUrl|main]“>[title] ( [imgWidth|main] x [imgHeight|main] )</a>. To every photo you post, PhotoQ will thus add a custom field with name “mainLink” that contains a link to the (main image size version) of the photo, the link’s text being the title of the post, followed by the dimensions of the photo. In your theme you can show this link with the usual call to something like get_post_meta().

• “Photo Description”: For the content view you can inline the photo description. If you choose to do so, the description is not only stored in the “photoQDescr” custom field but a <p> tag containing the description and having a CSS class name “photoQDescr” is added after the single photo (image link, respectively).
• “Exif Meta Data”: For the content view you can also inline EXIF information. If you choose to do so an unordered list with selected EXIF tags is displayed at the end of the post. See the EXIF section for more information.

With every post, PhotoQ also stores a number of custom fields that you can use in your templates. We have already seen some of them like “photoQDescr”. To display a custom fields in your theme you can for example use the WordPress function get_post_meta. Example: <?php echo get_post_meta($post->ID, 'photoQDescr', true); ?> Here is a list of custom fields provided by PhotoQ for every photo post:

• “photoQDescr”: Contains the description of the photo.
• “photoQPath”: Contains the path of the original image. Never remove this, it is crucial for the functioning of PhotoQ.
• “photoQImageSizes”: Contains an associative array (key = name of image size) with info on the image sizes. This allows easy access to the different image sizes from a template. For every image size there are the following fields: ‘imgTag’, ‘imgUrl’, ‘imgPath’, ‘imgWidth’, ‘imgHeight’. I guess the names are pretty self explanatory. To output the <img> tag of the “main” image size you could do something like: $sizes = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'photoQImageSizes', true);
echo $sizes['main']['imgTag'];
• “photoQExif” and “photoQExifFull”: See below under “EXIF Support”.
• One custom field per “Meta Field”, see below under “Meta Fields”.

Theme Authors – Create a Preset for your Theme

If you want your users to benefit from PhotoQ auto-configuration, you, as a theme author, can easily create presets for your theme:

1. Configure PhotoQ to your liking.
2. Once you are happy with how it interacts with your theme, go to “Settings->PhotoQ->Auto Configuration”.
3. Fill in the form by providing information about your theme. All information is optional, but it might help your users as well as myself if you enter all the information accurately.
4. Once you hit “Create Theme Preset”, PhotoQ generates an XML file that contains all your current settings that are relevant for how your posts are displayed. In particular these are all the “ImageSizes” settings, all the “Views” settings, all the “Meta Fields” that you defined and the “Exif Formatting Options”. Further, you also have two checkboxes that allow you to additionally include the “PhotoQ Default Category” and “PhotoQ Default Tags” options, if they are required by your theme.
5. Your users can place the generated XML file in a folder called “MyPhotoQPresets” that they create inside “wp-content” (PhotoQ needs read access to this folder, of course). The preset then shows up in the list of presets.
6. You can also send me a pointer to the XML file, I might then include it as a default in future PhotoQ versions.
7. Of course, even if you are not a theme author planning to release a preset, creating a preset is also a simple means of saving the current display related PhotoQ settings, such that you can reload them later.

EXIF Support

PhotoQ has built-in support for displaying EXIF metadata added to your photos by your digital camera. Whenever you upload a photo, PhotoQ learns about EXIF tags present in the photo. For every photo posted, PhotoQ stores two custom fields along with the post.

1. “photoQExif”: You can select which EXIF tags to include in this field by dragging EXIF tags from the “deselected” list to the “selected” list under “Settings->PhotoQ->Exif”. You can also move tags between these two lists by clicking the corresponding “Switch Sides” link. EXIF tags will appear in the custom field in the order they have in the “selected” list. They can be reordered via drag-and-drop. For every EXIF tag you can also choose a custom display name. This allows you to e.g. display “DateTimeOriginal” as “Date” in your theme.A new cool feature is the possibility to automatically generate WordPress tags from EXIF metadata. If you e.g. check the “Create post tags from EXIF data” check-box of the “Make” and “ApertureValue” EXIF tags, PhotoQ will automatically add WordPress tags “f/2.8″ and “Canon” to the post of a photo that was shot with a Canon at f/2.8.For every available tag, you can also see a value in parentheses next to its name. These values are example values found in one of the photos you uploaded and are simply there to give you a better idea of what the corresponding EXIF tag is about.The custom field is formatted according to the settings under “Exif Formatting Options”. By default it has the following structure of an unordered list allowing for easy CSS styling: <ul class="photoQExifInfo"> <li class="photoQExifInfoItem"> <span class="photoQExifTag">tag name</span> <span class="photoQExifValue">tag value</span> </li> </ul>
2. “photoQExifFull”: This custom field contains an associative PHP array (with keys corresponding to EXIF tags) containing all the EXIF data present in the photo. You can use this in your theme if you wish to have more flexibility than with the unordered list in “photoQExif”.

Watermarking

To protect your photos, PhotoQ gives you the possibility to add a watermark. Watermarking settings are found under “Settings->PhotoQ->Watermarking”. I think that the options are quite self-explanatory:

1. Upload an image file to be used as watermark.
2. Select position, opacity and margin from edges.
3. For each image size defined under “Settings->PhotoQ->Image Sizes”, decide whether it should show the watermark or not via the “Add watermark to all images of this size” checkbox.
4. Note that watermarks are not applied to the original images you uploaded. If you want to show a watermarked version of your photos in original size, you have to create another image size where you check both the “Original Size” radio button and the watermarking checkbox.
5. If you don’t want people to have access to your non-watermarked original photo, you can check the “Hide original folder” option under “Settings->PhotoQ->Image Sizes”. PhotoQ then places original photos in folder with a name that is hard to guess instead of the standard ‘original’ folder, hiding your original photos from unwanted access.

Meta Fields

If you want to add more information to your photo posts than just the title and description provided by default, you have the possibility to do so via “Meta Fields”. Assume you want to associate each photo with the place where the photo was taken:

1. Go to “Settings->PhotoQ->Meta Fields” in the Wordpress Administration Panel.
2. Click “Add Meta Field”.
3. Give it a name, e.g. “place” and hit “Add Field”.
4. For every photo you upload you will now have an additional field called “place” where you can enter the desired information. Once posted, the field is saved as a custom field with the same name.
5. The list of Meta Fields can be edited by clicking on “Rename” or “Delete”.
6. The three options “Upon Add/Delete/Rename” define whether changes you make to a Meta Field are also applied to the corresponding Custom Field of already posted photos. Example: Assume you already posted 20 photos and only then decide to add a new Meta Field called “place”. If you check “Upon Add, Add to already posted as well”, a Custom Field named “place” (with an empty value) will be added to all of the already posted photos as well.

Automatic Posting Via Cronjobs

PhotoQ allows you to have the top of your queue posted at regular intervals. This is especially useful if you go on a vacation and still want your photoblog to go on. Just fill up the queue before you leave and have PhotoQ do the rest. To set up automatic posting, you need to do the following:

1. Set the frequency at which the posts should occur. This can be set in “Settings->PhotoQ->Further Options->Automatic Posting”.
2. Remember where on your web server you saved the file “wimpq-cronpost.php”.
3. Setup a cronjob to execute “wimpq-cronpost.php” at your desired interval. Don’t worry, most often your webhost will set this up for you if you tell him/her the URL of your “wimpq-cronpost.php” file and when and how often you want the cronjob to be executed.
4. Upon each execution of “wimpq-cronpost.php”, PhotoQ checks whether the last post occurred more than X hours ago (where X is the value you set in the PhotoQ Options panel). If so, the top of your queue is posted automatically.
5. It might thus be a good idea to set the PhotoQ cron job frequency slightly lower than the interval of the actual cron job. E.g., assume you want a post once a day. Setup your cron job to execute the “wimpq-cronpost.php” file once a day at the desired time and set the “cronjob runs every x hours” in the “PhotoQ Options” to “23h”.
6. One execution of the cron job can post multiple photos if you check “Use settings of second post button for automatic posting.” In this case you can set the number of photos to post in the “Second Post Button” settings under “Further Options”.
7. You can also add all photos in the FTP upload folder automatically to the queue when the cronjob runs. This can be useful on a fully automated site where you have some mechanism to automatically upload photos to the FTP directory, and you want its content automatically posted. To do so you need to check “When cronjob runs, automatically add FTP uploads to queue.” and FTP uploads need to be enabled and configured as well of course. Also make sure that PhotoQ has write permissions to the FTP directory, otherwise it is not able to move the photos from the FTP directory to the queue but it will only copy them and reattempt to move them again the next time the cronjob is executed.
8. Note: If your webhost does not allow you to setup your own cronjob you might be able to do something similar with a Wordpress plugin such as WP-Cron (I have not tested this, so should you be able to make PhotoQ work together with such a plugin, please drop me a line).
9. A neat alternative solution to the above has been brought to my attention by Phil from halfmad.com. If your webhost does not allow cronjobs you can alter the WordPress index.php file in the following way: <?php /* Short and sweet */ define('WP_USE_THEMES', true); ob_start(); require('./wimpq-cronpost.php'); ob_end_clean(); require('./wp-blog-header.php'); ?>This then emulates a pseudo-cron executed every time a user visits your website. Thanks Phil, for pointing this out.
10. A nice tutorial on how to setup a cronjob for WordPress and PhotoQ was written by Jay Versluis. Thanks a lot!

More Options

The following options are not explained elsewhere in this post. They can all be found under “Settings->PhotoQ->Further Options”.

• “ImageMagick Path”: Here you can set the path to the ImageMagick convert binary on your webserver. If you set this path, PhotoQ will use ImageMagick instead of the GD library. A note shows you whether the path you entered is correct. Depending on the amount of memory assigned to PHP and the size of your photos, you may have to configure ImageMagick for PhotoQ to work properly.
• Import photos uploaded via FTP. The option “FTP Upload” lets you enable importing photos from a specified directory on your server. Once enabled, you get a new button “Import from ftp directory…” when adding photos to your queue. A click on the buttons leads to the FTP import screen where you can choose which photos from the ftp directory PhotoQ should import and where you can also enter common info for the photos to be imported. Note that depending on whether PhotoQ has write permissions to the ftp directory it will copy (if it doesn’t have write permission) or move (if it does) the selected files from the ftp directory to the queue.
• Publish several photos from the queue at once. In the PhotoQ management panel (”Posts->PhotoQ”) there is a second post button to the left of the “Post Top of Queue…” button. With the “Second Post Button” option you can specify how many photos are published at once if you hit this button.
• Roles and Capabilities: As of version 1.7, PhotoQ supports WordPress Roles and Capabilities. The following roles are allowed to use PhotoQ: “administrator”, “editor” and “author”. Administrators are the only ones allowed to change PhotoQ Settings. All three roles are allowed to access the queue. However, authors are only allowed to edit/delete the photos they uploaded to the queue themselves. Additionally, PhotoQ defines the following three capabilities: The capability…
  1. …to reorder the queue
  2. …to use the primary post button to publish posts
  3. …to use the secondary post button to publish posts

  For both the editor and the author role you can decide whether to grant or deny any of these three capabilities.

• “PhotoQ Default Author”: If no author was specified / could be determined, posts generated by PhotoQ will be published under this author.
• “PhotoQ Post Status”: Here you can choose the status of posts published via PhotoQ.
• “PhotoQ Default Category”: Here you can choose the default category for PhotoQ posts.
• “PhotoQ Default Tags”: Same for tags, here you can choose the default tags for PhotoQ posts.
• Lists of categories can be folded away throughout the plugin which is convenient if you deal with a lot of categories. The “Fold Categories” option lets you decide whether you want category lists to be open or closed by default.
• “Deleting Posts: Delete image files from server when deleting post”: If not checked, image files associated with a post are left on the server if you delete the post.
• “Admin Thumbs”: Here you can define the size of the thumbnails shown in the Admin section.
• “Auto Titles”: Here you can specify whether to generate titles automatically from filenames or from the EXIF “ImageDescription” tag. If you choose to create titles from filenames, you can enter a regular expression defining what parts of the filename to omit for automatically generated titles. Further, you can define rules that specify how automatically generated post titles should be capitalized.
• “Auto Description”: If you annotated your photos with a description embedded in the EXIF “ImageDescription” tag, you can choose to automatically generate the photo description from this tag here.

Under “Settings->PhotoQ->Maintenance” you will additionally find a button called “Rebuild All”. This can be used to force rebuilding of all your posted photos. Every downsized version of a photo is then rebuilt from its original according to your PhotoQ settings and the corresponding post is adapted accordingly. Note that “Rebuild All” is meant as a maintenance tool. Normally, you should not need to use it to keep your website consistent: PhotoQ rebuilds posted photos whenever a relevant setting changes.

PhotoQ for WPMU

Most of PhotoQ’s features work in exactly the same way under WordPress and WPMU. Here is a list of the few things that are specific to WPMU.

• Install into “plugins” folder not “mu-plugins”.
• FTP uploads are disabled in WPMU. Users likely do not have FTP access anyway.
• “imgdir” cannot be chosen but is fixed to the upload directory of the individual blog.
• All users share the same cache directory located at “wp-content/photoQCache”.
• Some settings like, e.g., the ImageMagick setting, can only be changed by site admins and are  sitewide, i.e., they apply to all blogs.
• You can place your own theme presets in the folder “wp-content/myThemePresets” (just create it if isn’t there and make sure Photoq has read access). These presets will then be available sitewide.
• Cronjobs: Put the “wimpq-cronpost.php” file (or to whatever you rename it to) to the WP root as explained in the PhotoQ documentation. To run the cronjob on a specific blog you need to execute the corresponding url: e.g., blogXY.yoursite.com/wimpq-cronpost.php or yoursite.com/blogXY/wimpq-cronpost.php instead of what you would do with standard WordPress (which would be yoursite.com/wimpq-cronpost.php). How to automate this process upon creation of every new blog is explained in an excellent tutorial (in French) by Stéphane Briot. Thanks Stéphane!

PhotoQ in Your Language

As of version 1.7, PhotoQ has support for internationalization. I am looking for people who are motivated to translate PhotoQ into their own language. If you would like to translate it, please drop me a line first such that I coordinate and make sure it doesn’t get translated into the same language twice. All i18n related files can be found in the “/lang” directory inside the plugin folder. Currently, the translation status of PhotoQ is the following:

• Chinese – Hong Kong – 香港 (zh_HK) by Anthony Chan: .mo, .po
• Chinese – Taiwan – 臺灣 (zh_TW) by Anthony Chan: .mo, .po
• French – Français (fr_FR) by Ulrich Sossou: .mo, .po
• English: default, part of core
• German – Deutsch (de_DE): part of core, bundled with PhotoQ
• Spanish – Español (es_ES) by Caleidos: .mo, .po

For errors, suggestions, questions or whatever regarding a translation please contact the translator directly whenever possible. Thanks.

Troubleshooting – Help it doesn’t work!

Here is a short checklist in case something doesn’t work as expected. Please go through this before asking me for help.

1. Did you check the requirements?
2. Clearing your browser’s cache can work wonders.
3. Did you check the PhotoQ options? Especially, are the paths to your “imgdir” correct?
4. Are you sure “cache” and “imgdir” file permissions are set correctly?
5. Do you have other plugins installed? If so, disable all other plugins and check whether it works now. Should you find any incompatibilities with other plugins please let me know. So far I know about the following plugins that are not compatible with PhotoQ: “Lighter Admin Drop Menus v2.3″.
6. Does it work with batch uploads disabled? If not, try to make it work with batch uploads disabled first.
7. “Everything seems to work but even if I enable batch uploads, I only get the option to upload one file at a time!” Is JavaScript enabled in your web browser?
8. “I get a HTTP 403 error message when trying to do a batch upload?” Most probably, your web hosting provider enabled mod_security on your web server. Batch upload makes use of Flash and Flash is known to send malformed http headers which are rejected by mod_security. The only solution seems to be to turn off mod_security by adding the directives given above to your .htaccess file. Anyone having a better solutions is most welcome to let me know about it.
9. “I am getting a ‘Warning: set_time_limit() has been disabled for security reasons…’ or similar”. Some web hosting providers limit the execution time of PHP scripts and do not allow you to change it. PhotoQ tries to remove the limit because if you have a large batch upload, it might take some time. If you get warnings like the one above, you can comment the line set_time_limit(0); in the beginning of the whoismanu-photoq.php file by replacing it with //set_time_limit(0);Huge batch upload jobs might then however sometimes be aborted if they take longer than the maximum execution time allowed by your web hosting provider.
10. “In the admin section I get light blue images with a red warning like ‘… All attempts to create GD image source failed …’ instead of the thumbnails”. You hit the memory limit with the GD library. This leaves you with three options in order of preference:
    1. configure ImageMagick (see under “More Options”)
    2. increase memory allocated to PHP by adding something like php_value memory_limit 16M (and where you replace 16M with the amount of memory you want to allocate) to your .htaccess file.
    3. upload smaller, down-sized images.
11. “When I click on ‘Select Photos’, nothing happens!” Probably you are using Flash Player 10 and a PhotoQ version prior to 1.6. Upgrade to at least PhotoQ 1.6 for Flash Player 10 support.
12. “I am not able to delete files that were created by PhotoQ from the server.”. This is most likely because your FTP user does not correspond to the user under which PHP runs. You can try to fix permissions via “Fix Permissions” under “Settings->PhotoQ->Maintenance”.

If nothing helps, don’t hesitate to ask – I would be glad to help. In order to be able to help you, I need to at least know the versions of Wordpress and PhotoQ you are using, your browser/platform combination, whether it works with batch uploads disabled and of course the potential error message you are getting. If you get an error message of any kind, it might also be helpful to know what you were trying to do just before you got the error message. But please check the points above before writing about a problem. At least double-check the requirements. It will save me (and you!) a lot of time that is better spent improving PhotoQ than looking for imaginary problems. Also please use the Support Forum for bug reports and support questions rather than posting here or sending me email. Thanks.

Support PhotoQ – Help to Make PhotoQ Better

You like PhotoQ? Here’s what you can do to support PhotoQ and help making it better:

• Any comments, suggestions, bug reports, feature requests, contributions to future versions, compatible themes, etc., etc. are highly appreciated. Any help to improve PhotoQ is more than welcome. I cannot fix/improve anything if I don’t know what is wrong.
• You use PhotoQ? Why not give PhotoQ credit through a backlink on your website?
• You think PhotoQ is the greatest plugin out there? There are many ways to promote PhotoQ: Tell your friends, or even tell the world by writing a blog post, …
• You made a photoblog using PhotoQ? Let me know. I will soon include a list of the best PhotoQ based blogs.
• You made/saved money thanks to PhotoQ? Due to repeated request I set up a donate link to give you the chance to give some of it back ;-)

Version History

• 22.11.2009 – 1.8.3: WPMU compatible, queue sorting, non-standard wp-content dirs, new handling of permissions. Some bugs fixed.
• 23.09.2009 – 1.8.2: Fixes bug resulting in queue not posted in correct order.
• 22.09.2009 – 1.8.1: Fixes bug with photo uploads on Windows servers. See the forum for more bugs fixed.
• 18.08.2009 – 1.8: Major update: new freeform view settings, extended theme support, auto-configuration for themes. Some bug fixes.
• 23.07.2009 – 1.7: Major update: adds internationalization, roles/capabilities, new EXIF handling, automatic tags from EXIF information, new handling of published photo editing, proper capitalization of auto titles, dashboard widget, default status of PhotoQ posts. Update to PhpThumb 1.7.9. A lot of bug fixes.
• 16.06.2009 – 1.6.6: Now compatible with WP 2.8.
• 08.04.2009 – 1.6.5: Time consuming tasks now split over several Ajax requests. Rebuild all photos with single click. Bugs fixed: wrong escaping in batch uploads; unnecessary photo rebuilds when changing options.
• 18.03.2009 – 1.6.4: Bugs fixed: PhotoQ default category and default author that stopped working in 1.6.3 now should work again.
• 11.03.2009 – 1.6.3: Bugs fixed: Now compatible with WP 2.7.1: No more disappearing photo descripitons etc. after batch uploads; Database table definitions adjusted to prevent problem with IIS servers. Option handling refactored. Same goes for object handling in PHP4.
• 25.01.2009 – 1.6.2: Better interaction between iQ2 and PhotoQ, singleton pattern updated.
• 16.12.2008 – 1.6.1: Cron jobs should now work again. Multiple photos can now be posted automatically at once, upon automatic posting photos uploaded via FTP can now be automatically added to the queue.
• 12.12.2008 – 1.6: Compatible with WordPress 2.7, compatible with Flash Player 10, regex for auto titles, better support for Canon EXIF maker notes, puts less stress on web server.
• 13.11.2008 – 1.5.3: Fixed problem with identical post dates when batch posting.
• 04.11.2008 – 1.5.2: Introduces FTP uploading, batch publishing, category folding and nicer default titles. Cache folder is no longer inside plugin folder to prevent problems with auto upgrade. Database changes include new id for the main table and WordPress charsets and collations for all PhotoQ tables. inline description moved from <p> tags to <div> to prevent problems with the WYSIWYG editor.
• 24.09.2008 – 1.5.1: Repacked PhotoQ with new folder structure on WordPress plugin directory to overcome auto upgrade problems. Root plugin directory is now “photoq-photoblog-plugin” instead of “whoismanu-photoq”.
• 22.09.2008 – 1.5: Major Update, most code rewritten. New libaries used: phpThumb and Exifixer. New features include: multiple image sizes, exif, watermarking, easy update of posted photos.
• 15.07.2008 – 1.2.6: Compatible with WordPress 2.6.
• 06.05.2008 – 1.2.5: Category handling adapted to WordPress 2.5.1. Two new settings to choose default category and author of PhotoQ posts.
• 22.04.2008 – 1.2.4: Bugs fixed: Problems with filenames containing special characters; Disappearing Media Library update links in Write panel caused by PhotoQ.
• 16.04.2008 – 1.2.3: Bugs fixed: PHP4 compatibility restored, no more lost settings; Now compatible with localized WP versions, no more “swfu not defined”. Now also compatible with IE7; SWFUpload updated to 2.1.0b2.
• 04.04.2008 – 1.2.2: Bugs fixed: Ajax queue ordering did not work if dashes present in filenames; Header of queue no long sortable; Correct authentication of Ajax queue manipulations; Cookies no longer sent during Ajax calls.
• 15.03.2008 – 1.2.1: Fixes a bug that could under some conditions provoke empty width and height attributes
• 09.03.2008 – 1.2: Compatible with WP 2.5. Migrated batch uploads to SWFUpload 2 for greater stability. Ajax Queue Management. Lightbox Integration. Runs on Reusable Options.
• 25.11.2007 – 1.1.5b: PhotoQ is now able to truly resize photos. It now also integrates with existing themes more easily because of the new option to directly include the description in the post content. Category display bug when updating queue has been corrected.
• 07.11.2007 – 1.1.4b: PhotoQ is now again retro-compatible with Wordpress versions that do not have built-in tagging support. Only update if you use a Wordpress version prior to 2.3.
• 04.11.2007 – 1.1.3b: PhotoQ now supports Wordpress’ native tag handling introduced in Wordpress 2.3. Please read this post to see how to import tags from meta fields to the new structure.
• 20.10.2007 – 1.1.2b: changed require_once statements so that the plugin also runs on web servers that don’t like relative paths in these statements. Update only if you encountered problems with version 1.1.1b.
• 17.10.2007 – 1.1.1b: “Largest Side” image/thumb-size option is now a “Smallest Side” option. “Largest Side” can still be mimicked by setting both values in the “Maximum Dimensions” option equal to the desired value.
• 14.10.2007 – 1.1b: first major update. Features mass uploads via SWFUpload. New options for image/thumbnail sizes. Better photo preview in admin section. Enhanced security due to use of wp_nonces. Under the hood, big parts of the code have been restructured.
• 07.10.2007 – 1.0.2b: patch to make it compatible with Wordpress 2.3.
• 22.01.2007 – 1.0.1b: fixed a bug that caused PhotoQ to handle some paths and urls improperly. Anyone wanting to use PhotoQ should update to this new version.
• 11.01.2007 – 1.0b: first public release.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to all the PhotoQ users who help to keep up my motivation to continue this project. Thanks for all the kind comments and helpful bug reports. Many thanks to the guys at http://swfupload.org. Without their great SWFUpload script, there would be no batch uploads in PhotoQ. Sames goes for James Heinrich who wrote the phpThumb Library and Jake Olefsky who wrote the Exifixer library. Without their great work PhotoQ would not be where it is today.