As a photographer I make heavy use of the meta-data/Library/Catalog features in digital asset management systems, such as Lightroom and Capture One,  to organize my images. I do this so I can easily search for images when a client calls looking to see if I have photos in my stock catalog that matches their needs. Typically I organize my images by country, state/region, city, person, and keyword (which describes the image). Also, sometimes I get asked for images made with a specific camera or lens.

It’s easy for me to do these searches in Lightroom or Capture One, but it means I have to be at my computer which doesn’t always line up with the busy timetables of art buyers.

This is why I wrote the PhotoPress – Image Taxonomies Plugin (free and available in the WordPress plugin repository). The plugin allows me to easily transfer the meta-data I use to organize images in Lightroom/Capture One over to my WordPress website where it can be used by visitors to browse and search for my images online.

What is a Taxonomy?

Taxonomies in WordPress are a great way to associate meta-data with your content. The best example of this is WordPress’s  core “tags” feature which lets you associate multiple keywords/phrases (i.e. a Tag) with any Post or Page that you create. WordPress also automatically creates an archive page for each Tag – allowing visitors to view all Posts that have been tagged with a specific “tag”.

The WordPress core Tags feature is implemented by using it’s own specific Taxonomy. This means,with a little bit of plugin magic, we can use the same approach for associating “Tag like” meta-data to Image Attachment Pages (which are created whenever you upload a new image).

How Does the Plugin Work?

The PhotoPress – Images Taxonomies plugin creates a number of custom image taxonomies including:

• photos_country – used to store the name of the country where a photo was made
• phot0s_state – used to store the name of the state/region where a photo was made.
• photos_city – used to store the name of the city where a photo was made.
• photos_people – used to store the names of people depicted in the photo.
• photos_keywords – used to store keywords that describe the photo.
• photos_camera – used to store the type of camera used to make the photo.
• photos_lens – used to store the type of lens used to make the photo.
• photos_collection – used store the names of any collections that the photo belongs to.

After installing the plugin it’s a four step process to start using it:

1. You add meta-data to the image in Lightroom, Capture One, Photoshop
2. You upload the file to WordPress using the standard image uploader
3. The plugin extracts the meta data that is embedded in the file and automatically populates the appropriate taxonomy
4. The plugin displays the meta-data for an image on its image attachment Page through the use of two Widgets (here’s an example)

There are lots of things you can do with this plugin . You can review the meta-data, make changes/additions by editing the image attachment in the media library, create links to Taxonomy archive pages for these new image taxonomies, create a galleries of images filtered by Taxonomy and a specific Term. There are even plugins available to make these images searchable by this new taxonomy data. I cover all of this and more in the Guide To WordPress for Photographers.

For more information on how to install the plugin see the PhotoPress – Image Taxonomies page in the WordPress plugin repository.