Gallery Pro Video Metadata for YouTube + Titles, etc

Elements
1

So while this is about metadata for videos, it also applies to image metadata when it comes to titles, but also to videos, and also for captions when it comes to videos.

The specific thing I’m wondering about, and I don’t know if it’s possible if the videos were uploaded to your own personal site, does Gallery Pro already show video metadata captions?

Obviously, if you’re someone who’s going to post a whole bunch of videos, it’s really financially unfeasible to host all of your own videos and expect to be able to get a bunch of views and not have to pay ridiculous amounts of money.

A question, and I don’t know what the possibility is here, but when we drop a YouTube playlist in as a resource in the Resources sidebar, and it pulls in all of the thumbnails for the videos associated with that playlist, is it not possible for it to also pull in titles and descriptions and then have that applied as metadata? Because as it stands, it’s nice to be able to have a whole playlist of YouTube videos as a gallery, but there’s no specific identifier for what that video is until somebody goes and actually clicks on one, and that’s a bit disappointing.

I don’t know what Google allows for when pulling information about videos in the fashion that you’re doing, or in the fashion that something like Downie does or anybody else, but if it were at all possible to actually scrape the titles and the description as a Title & Caption, that would be really amazing. And I would even go out of my way to go onto my YouTube channel and edit my descriptions so that it more properly would fit into the space available for a caption on the website in Gallery Pro.

The same request also exists for your regular images and titles. For some reason, as it stands, you don’t have a metadata spot allowable for titles. I was just going to use the creator space to add the titles in instead, but that would place the title below the description, and that doesn’t make sense.

Also, apparently in caption metadata, carriage returns are possible, so I was hoping to try that out so that I could at least have the title on one line and then the rest of the caption on the next line down in a paragraph. But when Gallery Pro plugin pulled in the caption data, it ignored the carriage return.

So that’s a few things, but just curious. I don’t know if this is the best way to go about a feature request, but these are actually not insignificant issues when the point in your gallery use is to promote your work professionally and the only thing you have is to build out some kind of a description before the gallery section on your page to tell people what the videos are about. They’ve got nothing else to reference unless they click all the way through to see the video play. This seems like exactly the kind of thing that would turn this into a full “Pro” plugin. Curious to see if that’s a possibility.

Thanks,
Glen

2

Looking into the YouTube metadata question, it seems that there already exists an official YouTube Data API, and on playlist items request can retrieve both ‘snippet.title’ and ‘snippet.description’ information. This feature, would be very, very useful.

My suggestion, based on how this plugin works, would be to use whatever YouTube API you’re already using to pull the thumbnail and the video link in, and just also pull those other two bits of metadata in, and embed them into the thumbnail for each video as the metadata for that video. The gallery plugin already reads that metadata. So it would be just the perfect container to separate out the metadata for everything in the playlist, and make sure it is assigned to each thumbnail for each video being presented as a gallery item. The only thing you would have to mention to users is that if they were interested in replacing that thumbnail, they would want to deliberately update the metadata associated with it. [Which just made me wonder, if I upload my own thumbnail with metadata, does it display it? Because I obviously could just solve this whole problem that I’m having with that in particular. I guess I should try that out.] But still, as a feature, this would be very, like, chef’s kiss.

Well, one of my questions obviously is already answered, and that is that the title would not be displayed even if they uploaded a custom thumbnail with a description & title in it, because Gallery Pro already doesn’t display title information. So, you would have to embed that into the description. So, the other comment I make in this post about the Title aspect is still relevant.

3

I realize that currently you’re not actually downloading the thumbnail data for each of those YouTube videos into the user’s resources section. But this may be the answer for how to make this work. Since those are the thumbnails the user has already created and uploaded for their video, along with their own title and along with their own description. Then grabbing that thumbnail, downloading it, embedding those things into the thumbnail, and saving it in the user resources area, along with the links that you have. And it could just have the same title, underscore thumb, whatever. Then that would be your, maybe, solution for attaching the metadata that you would then need to display along with each of the videos. You know, that’s a bit beyond my pay grade when it comes to understanding how programming works. But I can see how that builds the resource out the way that one would need in order to accomplish this kind of solution.

I also just remembered that Gallery Pro doesn’t let you set your own thumbnails for playlists on YouTube. That’s just your regular video component that does that. So, yeah, no, I couldn’t do that anyway. So I guess the above solution would be how one would attempt to do this.

To note: I’m not trying to step on anybody’s toes either. I’m just a systems thinker, and so I’m trying to present solutions for the problems that I’m finding. If it can help a developer get to a place easier, then that’s the reason why. If it is considered improper or offensive or doesn’t meet the etiquette requirements for this forum, please feel free to let me know.

Glen

4

Hi @GlenAllan

Thanks for the feedback!

Currently we use the video’s title for the thumbnail image’s alt text.

If I’m understanding correctly, I think you want Elements to fetch the YouTube video title and description and store that as meta data in Elements, so components like Gallery Pro can display that information - is that correct?

5

Yes. As it is, there is no kind of title or description whatsoever for any of the videos in a YouTube gallery using Gallery Pro, so the user has no context whatsoever about what they’re clicking on outside of whatever text I happen to put above the gallery. And for some of my galleries, there’s quite a few videos in there, and it would be nice, especially for repeated visits, if they’ve come to know what the videos are. Otherwise, it would be nice because titles are descriptive and useful.

This would be nice for videos from YouTube being imported as well. It would give somebody at least a short-form version of the full description that’s on YouTube. Ideally, this field would be editable because the descriptions on YouTube can be really large, so it could pull in as much as it wanted and then offer the user the ability to edit that down to something that makes sense as a caption for, you know, a photo, basically. Except for this is then the description for the video.

I guess to enable this, it would require that the images do be fully downloaded and put into the user’s resources library. As I just learned, you can edit the caption through that. I’ve been using an external program, graphic converter, to do it. So if it pulled in even a truncated version initially and then allowed the user to go in and edit it down to something appropriate for the caption in a gallery, that would be extremely helpful.

And on the same note, of course, adding the meta field ability for titles would be great too. Worst case, I’ll do what I have been doing and add the title at the beginning of the description / caption.

6

we’ve just spoken internally about YouTube resources and needing the title, description, and other meta data to be saved in to Elements.

It is definitely something we want to add, however, we are full up with shipping Elements 3.0 and working on the AI features, so I can’t give you a timeline on when we’ll be able to add this.

We want to overhaul how YouTube videos are added to resources, so I think we will look at pulling in additional data at the same time.

I know that doesn’t solve the issue for you right now, so if you need help finding another solution please let me know and we’ll be happy to see what we can come up with :slight_smile:

7

It is what it is, honestly. When I purchase any kind of a program and the developers are responsive, and I’m able to request things that are reasonable, valid, and as useful as this kind of thing would be, and the reply that I get is, yeah, that sounds like a great idea, but we’ve got other stuff first. I don’t have a problem with that.

Of course, it would be awesome to have it as soon as possible, as I’ve not yet actually launched my site. Well, I haven’t shared the link publicly. But as much as it can do right now, it’s still quite decent. And if people really want to view those playlists with titles and everything, I can leave a note at the top saying, you know, head over to YouTube. That’s not ideal, but I can work around things and instruct the user to take a different route if, you know, what they see isn’t satisfactory. For the smaller playlists, I can just comment in the fields above that I’ve already put in information in, giving some information on the different videos that are being shown, etc., etc.

So yes, thank you for the response. I appreciate that you will be definitely putting effort into doing this when it makes sense!

Glen