[Plugin: NextGEN Gallery] Reading keywords

I’m so glad it worked for you!

By the way, the FotoMoto buttons are automatically added to the search results on all 3 sites where I run it, so it should not be a problem and will need no extra code. If that is not the case for you, let me know.

The operators are the “+” and “-” (plus and minus) keys. Example: I only want pictures of girls with dogs.
Search “+girl +dog” (without quotes)

and I only get a picture of a girl with a dog.

Example: +girl +dog -boy and we cut the guy out of the picture ??

It is all very simple to walk on water when you know where the rocks are under the surface.

Lee

Hi again, Lee. Many thanks for explaining the operators, that helps a lot. I’ll put some instructions in there soon.

Unfortunately, I now have a new challenge to grapple with (or rather, find out where the rocks are under the surface!) as the FotoMoto plugin I have does not work with WP search results, it only works with designated pages and categories. I have the option of disabling the plugin and manually going through the WHOLE site to deselect photos I don’t want to have buy buttons… but that would take an eternity. I’ve configured the plugin I have so that one can only buy from the image archives section. Any ideas on this? FotoMoto have said they’ve added this issue to their list… but I don’t know how long it will take them to find a solution.

Cheers,

Robin

Hi Robin,

I checked your site and the search function is working wonderfully! Great job!

I just wrote an illustrated tutorial for installing and getting the plugin to work. It is on the Code Fixers site.
It is essentially the same as I wrote above, but easier to follow with pictures and coaching. I’ll make it a separate topic in this forum and on the NextGEN site as well for those who are looking

As for FotoMoto, I feel your pain. They do make it easy to choose which images are for sale and which are not on the FotoMoto Images page after you sign in, just not in batches. I’ve done that on one site with only 600 images and it was tedious, but not as time-consuming as I thought it would be. The new site coming up will have many thousand images and will be more challenging.

FotoMoto are very responsive, but have a long list of proposed changes and triage them according to severity and greatest good for greatest number.

I will continue to follow your progress and work with interest.

Lee

Hi again, Lee.

If I could just go back to your previous reply, I just tried the operators… they don’t seem to work as you described on my site. For example, I tried +egypt -flag, and the search engine stripped out the ‘+’, replacing it with a space, and included only pictures from Egypt with flags! I tried various other things using the operators as described, and every time it did something funny or came out wrong. Have you any idea why?

On the FotoMoto thing, could it be an option to have page a called ‘Image search’ and place the search function ONLY on that page (or at least make sure the results are always displayed there, even if the search is run from another point on the site), and then tell the FotoMoto plugin to place buy buttons on images displayed on this ‘Image search’ page? I Googled something around this and found these WP instructions on creating a custom search page: https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Creating_a_Search_Page – should following these help me do what I’m thinking of?

I agree, FotoMoto (I talk to Derek) ARE very responsive. But yes, that list of pending tasks could be long! Your visual guide looks good, by the way! Nice work.

Cheers,

Robin

Robin, you are right! The operators I gave you do not work. My first test worked for me only because I was mistaken on some assumed keywords on a site I manage and it turns out the photos I was thinking of were “woman” or “lady” and not girl. Sorry!
I can certainly get your photos of Egypt with Flag, but not without. Likewise “woman river” gives me that lovely shot of the woman in red, but “+woman -river” does not work.
Sorry!

I don’t know the FotoMoto API code as well as I ought, but I believe it would require some special coding by them in order to accomplish what seems to me is a very good idea. I know I’d use that function if it were available.

I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful this time, but I will give it more thought and maybe inspiration will strike!

Lee

puh, takes along time to go thru your conversation… now about the operators: I need to dig a bit deeper into the SQL query format. Did the operators worked for post / pages text search result ?

Oh, hi Alex! Thanks for stopping by this thread. Well, I just checked on that, and no they don’t work for text either. The plus sign gets removed, and the minus sign seems to be treated like a hyphen, so becomes pretty irrelevant.

Hi Alex, as Robin says, they do not work for pages and posts. I started a separate thread to see if there are ideas about this.

Lee

I’m no expert for SQL , but many times special chars ( i.e. +- ) will be removed from the request string for security reason before a search query will be created

Hmm… ok, so what do you suggest, Alex? Is the search run following rules set by the makers of WordPress or by your plugin? I tried ‘and’, ‘not’ and ‘or’ but these returned strange results. E.g. I have many photos tagged with ‘Egypt’, ‘revolution’ and ‘flag’. If you search for ‘revolution flag’ you see many photos from Cairo’s Tahrir Square that include the Egyptian flag. But if you search ‘revolution not flag’ you get only one image, which INCLUDES the flag! Yet I have many images that are tagged ‘revolution’ but not ‘flag’ (this is not one of them).

Lee, what’s the URL of the other thread?

As I said I will look into it what can be improved, maybe for 1.9.0… but it will take some time.

Thanks, Alex ?? Looking forward to that.

See also : https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/search-engine-booleans

it doesn’t work for wp.com, so it must be some reason for that (security, speed, etc…)

Oh, ok. That’s pretty surprising! I see there are various advanced search plugins available that support the use of boolean operators. Should I be able to install one of these without messing up what I achieved by installing your NGGSearch plugin?

You can use them, but they will not support or improve the result for NGG images….