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#1 2019-02-05 01:05:03

bernard45
Member
Registered: 2015-08-18
Posts: 103
Website

Meta Description ?

In CE4, it was possible to define in Page Setup: Mata description (of the website), Meta : Author , and Meta : keywords.
Where is the equivalent info in BL2 ?

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#2 2019-02-05 01:07:51

rod barbee
Moderator
From: Port Ludlow, WA USA
Registered: 2012-09-24
Posts: 17,830
Website

Re: Meta Description ?

No.

And meta: keywords really doesn’t matter. Page text content is more important for SEO. Work your keywords into the page text


Rod 
Just a user with way too much time on his hands.
www.rodbarbee.com
ttg-tips.com, Backlight 2/3 test site

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#3 2019-02-05 01:09:17

bernard45
Member
Registered: 2015-08-18
Posts: 103
Website

Re: Meta Description ?

Hi Rod,
You mean there is no equivalent or similar in BL2 ?
Bernard

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#4 2019-02-05 01:10:04

rod barbee
Moderator
From: Port Ludlow, WA USA
Registered: 2012-09-24
Posts: 17,830
Website

Re: Meta Description ?

No, there isn’t
See my revised response above


Rod 
Just a user with way too much time on his hands.
www.rodbarbee.com
ttg-tips.com, Backlight 2/3 test site

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#5 2019-02-05 01:11:28

rod barbee
Moderator
From: Port Ludlow, WA USA
Registered: 2012-09-24
Posts: 17,830
Website

Re: Meta Description ?


Rod 
Just a user with way too much time on his hands.
www.rodbarbee.com
ttg-tips.com, Backlight 2/3 test site

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#6 2019-02-05 01:12:57

bernard45
Member
Registered: 2015-08-18
Posts: 103
Website

Re: Meta Description ?

I typed too quickly ...
The CE4' Meta description was showing on the google results page, was a summary of the web site. No equivalent ?

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#7 2019-02-05 01:29:57

rod barbee
Moderator
From: Port Ludlow, WA USA
Registered: 2012-09-24
Posts: 17,830
Website

Re: Meta Description ?

there is a workaround for og:title and og:description

In albums and albums set, the album/set tidle and description are added to the page og:title and og:description respectively.

If you create an empty album (hide it from the album set) give it the title and description you want and insert that album into a page, then you'll get the og: title and og:description in the page metadata.


Rod 
Just a user with way too much time on his hands.
www.rodbarbee.com
ttg-tips.com, Backlight 2/3 test site

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#8 2019-02-05 15:59:14

JimR
Member
Registered: 2012-11-30
Posts: 348
Website

Re: Meta Description ?

Meta keywords are ignored these days. Don't even bother adding them to any page on a site. I've removed them from all of my WordPress templates.

The meta description is very important for search engines. I find this is set by the album description found in Lightroom, when publishing the album. Same with the title. It's taken from the album created in Lightroom.

I also found that the description can be set for the individual image files, the permalinks to each image. It's the captions set in the Backlight template. To generate a unique caption/description for each image, I've been using the metadata tokens.

For example, this will use a caption for the image if defined within Lightroom. That's a good place to actually create them. That caption appears under my photos, and even in the meta description at the permalink.

If the image doesn't have a caption, then I create one based on the Lightroom folder containing the image and concatenated with the date the image was taken.

I have this in the Tokens field of Captions, within the Photo Presentation part of my album template.

{LUA= if Caption ~= "" then return sprintf('"%s" %s %s', Caption, Month, YYYY) else return sprintf('"%s" %s %s', Folder, Month, YYYY) end}

BL uses a gallery method, where it shows the thumbs and a slide show for all the images within that album. This means, according to search engines, it's one page with one title and one description.

The individual images, found in the permalinks, can get their own unique descriptions (as shown above).

But I don't know how to give the permalinks files their own titles. To search engines, all the images within the albums have the same titles. This confuses the SEO, because each page should have it's own title. I don't know how to create unique titles for each permalink.

There is the Page Title within the Page Setup, under the Advanced Setup of the page template. It would be nice to be able to use the metadata tokens to create unique titles. Looks like it can only be set to the album's title.

The permalinks will be crawled and indexed by search engines. They're not easily found by users, but by being indexed there's a chance a Google search will present your page. If there was more control over the page's title and the file name, it could be better optimized for search.


PS - I've read about this workaround, of adding the title and description using the hidden empty album. I don't get it. When would I use that, and where does it show up?


--Jim

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#9 2019-02-05 22:19:54

rod barbee
Moderator
From: Port Ludlow, WA USA
Registered: 2012-09-24
Posts: 17,830
Website

Re: Meta Description ?

PS - I've read about this workaround, of adding the title and description using the hidden empty album. I don't get it. When would I use that, and where does it show up?

You can use it for stand alone pages (pages that are not albums). Say you had a page dedicated to showcasing your publications. Add an empty album to it that contains an album title and description.
The metadata then appears in the og:title and og:description meta tags.


Rod 
Just a user with way too much time on his hands.
www.rodbarbee.com
ttg-tips.com, Backlight 2/3 test site

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#10 2019-02-06 02:30:31

JimR
Member
Registered: 2012-11-30
Posts: 348
Website

Re: Meta Description ?

rod wrote:

You can use it for stand alone pages (pages that are not albums). Say you had a page dedicated to showcasing your publications. Add an empty album to it that contains an album title and description.

Ah, that only applies to one page.

What I'm looking for is a way to create unique titles for each photo's page.

What I get is every photo page in the album gets the same title as the album.


--Jim

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#11 2019-02-06 03:38:26

Daniel Leu
Moderator
Registered: 2012-10-11
Posts: 1,624
Website

Re: Meta Description ?

Jim, can you provide a link to what you refer to as "photo page"?


Daniel Leu | Photography   
DanielLeu.com
My digital playground (eg, Backlight tips&tricks): lab.DanielLeu.com

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#12 2019-02-06 10:37:22

JimR
Member
Registered: 2012-11-30
Posts: 348
Website

Re: Meta Description ?

Daniel wrote:

Jim, can you provide a link to what you refer to as "photo page"?

What I'm calling the "photo page" is the page with just the one photo on it. It's the page with the unique URL to the one photo.

I'm using albums with slide shows, which show as a gallery. From there I can do into the slide show, get to the sharing bar and select the permalink. That URL is the type that ends with ...single.php

Also seems to be the page you get if you are not using the slide show, but instead using single images. While within an album, you click on a photo and it brings up (what I call the photo page).



After experimenting, I realized, the page's title can be set from the image's title within Lightroom.

If the image's title is empty, it defaults to the image's file name.

This means I need to consider changing my Lightroom workflow. I don't like changing file names, but I see how I can change that only during publish. That's better, but not an idea page title. I end up with something like "blah-blah-001.jpg" for a page title. I actually do like it for a file name, but I am looking for a better way to control the title.

I have over 1000 photos published through LR/BL to my site. I'm not going to give each photo a unique title, by hand, within LR. I would be willing to go with the page title using a sequence, such as "blah blah 001"

The code for that would be something take the file name string, replace "-" with spaces, and drop the ".jpg" suffix. That's a reasonable default page title given the image doesn't have a title.

I can create reasonable file names using the publish options within LR to rename files. Those new names become the URL in BL.

I looked into using the metadata tokens, but there isn't a way to create a sequence (like I can for file names in the TTG Publisher).

I wish there was a way to automate page titles. Thinking the code, I can see how this is a hard problem to solve.

So to back up and try to re-approach the problem, here's what I'm wishing for.

How can I create unique page titles that are related to the photo's file name?

Last edited by JimR (2019-02-06 10:40:51)


--Jim

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#13 2019-02-06 11:07:02

Ben
Moderator
From: Melbourne, Australia
Registered: 2012-09-29
Posts: 4,399

Re: Meta Description ?

Hi Jim, from a Backlight perspective that could probably be done by adding a new setting within the Publisher section of Backlight Settings, e.g. Single Image Page Title Format with options such as Image Title (the current behaviour), Filename (forced to used the filename, whether the Title metadata existed or not) and Filename Converted to Title (for want of a better name - where Backlight code would convert any textual part of a filename to a Title, as you've described).
The filename-to-Title functionality would be easy enough to code.  We already have similar conversions in other places such as a slugToTitle utility function.

Does that sound like it would fit the bill?

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#14 2019-02-06 11:24:31

Daniel Leu
Moderator
Registered: 2012-10-11
Posts: 1,624
Website

Re: Meta Description ?

JimR wrote:
Daniel wrote:

Jim, can you provide a link to what you refer to as "photo page"?

What I'm calling the "photo page" is the page with just the one photo on it. It's the page with the unique URL to the one photo.

I'm using albums with slide shows, which show as a gallery. From there I can do into the slide show, get to the sharing bar and select the permalink. That URL is the type that ends with ...single.php

I thought that you were looking at a different page since my titles are propagate (as long as I put a title in there).


Daniel Leu | Photography   
DanielLeu.com
My digital playground (eg, Backlight tips&tricks): lab.DanielLeu.com

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#15 2019-02-06 11:32:36

Daniel Leu
Moderator
Registered: 2012-10-11
Posts: 1,624
Website

Re: Meta Description ?

Ben wrote:

Hi Jim, from a Backlight perspective that could probably be done by adding a new setting within the Publisher section of Backlight Settings, e.g. Single Image Page Title Format with options such as Image Title (the current behaviour), Filename (forced to used the filename, whether the Title metadata existed or not) and Filename Converted to Title (for want of a better name - where Backlight code would convert any textual part of a filename to a Title, as you've described).
The filename-to-Title functionality would be easy enough to code.  We already have similar conversions in other places such as a slugToTitle utility function.

Does that sound like it would fit the bill?

Ben, if you add a filename-to-Title function, then slugToTitle should be updated too, shouldn't it?

How about a simple phplugins function that overwrites the value currently used? This way, one could even include the album title, if desired.


Daniel Leu | Photography   
DanielLeu.com
My digital playground (eg, Backlight tips&tricks): lab.DanielLeu.com

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#16 2019-02-06 12:06:20

Ben
Moderator
From: Melbourne, Australia
Registered: 2012-09-29
Posts: 4,399

Re: Meta Description ?

Daniel Leu wrote:

Ben, if you add a filename-to-Title function, then slugToTitle should be updated too, shouldn't it?

slugToTitle accepts a string no matter where it came from.  That's just an example of code or similar code that's already there.

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#17 2019-02-06 13:13:27

Matthew
Administrator
From: San Francisco, CA
Registered: 2012-09-24
Posts: 5,795
Website

Re: Meta Description ?

rod barbee wrote:

You can use it for stand alone pages (pages that are not albums). Say you had a page dedicated to showcasing your publications. Add an empty album to it that contains an album title and description.
The metadata then appears in the og:title and og:description meta tags.

Somehow I had missed that was a thing people were doing. Seems kludgy to me. =/


Matt

The Turning Gate, http://theturninggate.net

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#18 2019-02-06 13:23:13

Matthew
Administrator
From: San Francisco, CA
Registered: 2012-09-24
Posts: 5,795
Website

Re: Meta Description ?

Daniel Leu wrote:

How about a simple phplugins function that overwrites the value currently used? This way, one could even include the album title, if desired.

For clarity, are you suggesting a PHPlugins hook to replace the page's TITLE element in the document head?

The title could easily be replaced via Javascript, using document.title via the existing PHPlugins hook for scripts.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/doc … ment/title

I don't know whether one approach or the other would yield greater SEO benefit. Google is supposedly good about parsing JavaScript for SEO. Supposedly ...


Matt

The Turning Gate, http://theturninggate.net

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#19 2019-02-06 14:52:33

Daniel Leu
Moderator
Registered: 2012-10-11
Posts: 1,624
Website

Re: Meta Description ?

Matthew wrote:
Daniel Leu wrote:

How about a simple phplugins function that overwrites the value currently used? This way, one could even include the album title, if desired.

For clarity, are you suggesting a PHPlugins hook to replace the page's TITLE element in the document head?

The title could easily be replaced via Javascript, using document.title via the existing PHPlugins hook for scripts.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/doc … ment/title

Ben proposed a new Publisher setting which would mean a hardcoded implementation. So instead of going this way, I think that a phplugins hook would be more versatile. AFAIK this would affect <title> as well as og:title and twitter:title. Having a matching crumb would make sense to me as well. This is a feature request from Jim, so he might be better to specify/clarify this.

I don't know whether one approach or the other would yield greater SEO benefit. Google is supposedly good about parsing JavaScript for SEO. Supposedly ...

I'd rather have my page ready on load and not depend on Google's capability to parse my JavaScript code.


Daniel Leu | Photography   
DanielLeu.com
My digital playground (eg, Backlight tips&tricks): lab.DanielLeu.com

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#20 2019-02-06 17:19:31

Matthew
Administrator
From: San Francisco, CA
Registered: 2012-09-24
Posts: 5,795
Website

Re: Meta Description ?

Not keen to put PHPlugins into the open graph implementation. That's an idea too fragile for my liking.


Matt

The Turning Gate, http://theturninggate.net

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#21 2019-02-08 03:03:25

JimR
Member
Registered: 2012-11-30
Posts: 348
Website

Re: Meta Description ?

I'm open to any suggestion on the implementation. I'll leave that to you guys. I'd also not want to crap up the UI by adding more complexity. The LR to BL interactions are already complex as it is. Personally, I would accept a PHPPlugin solution. I'd also like a metadata token solution (I'm already using it for captions).

Ben suggested a UI change in the publisher. It sounded like a 3-option choice. To keep the UI clean and simple, I'd go with the existing default behavior. Take the page title from the image title. If that doesn't exist, create on based on the file name.

Simply "clean" the file name to make it a better title. In my case, I create nicer file names during publishing such as "Nice-Name-001.jpg". So I would get a page title of "Nice Name 001."

You could make that the new default. Not sure how that might effect existing site's SEO. I actually think it would improve things, but I don't know of all the cases.

At most, maybe add a checkbox in the publisher. It would be something like "create clean titles from file names." Add that option next to the file naming option. This would simply strip out characters. Personally, I'd only use that option. So I'd vote you don't even need any UI.


I remember Matthew describing to me the individual photo page was mainly for SEO. That said, it would be great if we can improve on the photo page's title.

To step back and try to simply state the problem, the key pieces of data are:

page title
meta description
file name

I've found ways to bulk process the last two via publishing options, but not the title. File name I can set in the LR publishing option. I use the folder name to create file names and add a numbered sequence. The caption I can set with metadata tokens, and that's taken to create the meta description. But, I can only manually create a title. In my case I have well over 1000 images to process. So I'm looking for an automated way to manage this.

Ideally the title should be something unique, and plain (readable) text that's relevant to the image.

There are the metadata tokens, which I love. There is a special one for TTG that might be leveraged. It's the cell number token. Not sure if that can be leveraged to generate a title. I happen to use folder name and capture date to create captions. So maybe it's possible to create a title based on folder name and date, or even cell number.

But a simpler approach might be just to clean the file name and make that the title. It's better for SEO to have the the title match the file name (which becomes the permalink).


In the end, the goal is to increase SEO. That means getting a good title and description.


--Jim

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#22 2019-02-08 03:41:42

Daniel Leu
Moderator
Registered: 2012-10-11
Posts: 1,624
Website

Re: Meta Description ?

Jim, did you try the find & replace plugin? It looks like you can achieve a populated Title field in two steps: 1) copy filename to title field followed by 2) replacing unwanted characters by spaces.

Obviously this takes a bit more time than having an automated solution. But this way, you could have your title field populated within 'minutes'. Don't forget to select 'publish metadata only' in Lr Publisher when updating your images.


Daniel Leu | Photography   
DanielLeu.com
My digital playground (eg, Backlight tips&tricks): lab.DanielLeu.com

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#23 2019-02-08 05:44:32

Ben
Moderator
From: Melbourne, Australia
Registered: 2012-09-29
Posts: 4,399

Re: Meta Description ?

JimR wrote:

I'll leave that to you guys. I'd also not want to crap up the UI by adding more complexity. The LR to BL interactions are already complex as it is.

The setting would be under the Publisher settings of Backlight's settings, reachable via the Admin > Settings menu.  There wouldn't be any changes to the LR album dialogues.

I'm not keen on making new functionality like this only available to the PHPlugin.  Users should not have to use that technical approach for basic functionality.

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#24 2019-02-08 11:06:38

JimR
Member
Registered: 2012-11-30
Posts: 348
Website

Re: Meta Description ?

Ben wrote:

Jim, did you try the find & replace plugin? It looks like you can achieve a populated Title field in two steps: 1) copy filename to title field followed by 2) replacing unwanted characters by spaces.

I haven't tried find/replace. Looks like a nice GUI for a sql query command. But I can see how this wouldn't work, not in my workflow.

I have about 100 albums. I would have to setup the find/replace 100 times. Hopefully I could target just the albums setup to publish, and not my entire LR library.

Also not sure how it would work. I'm not replacing anything. I'm trying to generate an unique title, in the case there isn't already a title. Can find/replace even do that?

I would want the title to reflect the file name, which is also the permalink. The file name is generated at the time of publishing. So I can't keep the find/replace generated titles in sync with the file names.

I think it all has to happen at one originating source, at the time of publishing. Otherwise, things can't be kept in sync (even if it were possible and easy with find/replace).


--Jim

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