Restoring titles to inserted images in WordPress 3.5

Thanks for sharing!

I was just looking for this.
I’ve added your code in my functions.php theme file and with success. TNX!

Les Bessant, I’m responding to your request for a code review. This code solves your problem fine. But I see two issues that should be addressed before it goes out for general use.

First, if it’s activated on a pre 3.5 installation it will put an extra title attribute into the image; it inserts the title attribute without first checking whether one is already present.

Second, if the post_title happens to contain markup characters your code will emit a malformed img tag.

Other than that, looks good.

Thanks- I’ll have another crack at it later.

OK, revised version. This checks for title= in $html before doing anything. I’ve applied esc_attr() on post_title which should prevent most forms of breakage.

Had a few issues with the changed code in the actual plugin. Code coming soon.

And here it is, with typos fixed. Confirmed that markup in the image title is now handled.

<?php
/*
Plugin Name: Restore Image Title
Description: Reverses WP 3.5's behaviour of stripping title from images inserted into posts
Version: 1.1
License: GPL
Author: Les Bessant
Author URI: https://losingit.me.uk/
*/

function lcb_restore_image_title( $html, $id ) {

	$attachment = get_post($id);
    if (strpos($html, "title=")) {
    	return $html;
    	}
    else {
		$mytitle = esc_attr($attachment->post_title);
		return str_replace('<img', '<img title="' . $mytitle . '" '  , $html);
		}
}
add_filter( 'media_send_to_editor', 'lcb_restore_image_title', 15, 2 );
?>

This is now available in the plugin directory:

https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/restore-image-title/

Thanks Les,

I really was surprised that WP 3.5 removed the image titles since it is an important part of SEO. Your plugin is a life saver.

I’m also using the the_post_thumbnail() function. This displays the associated post thumbnail. Here the title tag is also missing.

To test this you need:
– add ‘add_theme_support(‘post-thumbnails’);’ inside functions.php
– associate image to post
– use ‘the_post_thumbnail();’ inside post template

Can you also add the title inside this image?

To restore the title attribute to images in a gallery, this worked code worked for me:

//Add title attribute back to gallery images
function my_image_titles($atts,$img) {
	$atts['title'] = trim(strip_tags( $img->post_title ));
	return $atts;
}
add_filter('wp_get_attachment_image_attributes','my_image_titles',10,2);

@grizgza, thank you very much!

@les Bessant, maybe this is a nice add-on for your plugin.

Thanks @les Bessant, it works.

But I think the solution might be a bit different: as we have the title for the <a> tag, but not for the image, maybe the TITLE for <a> should be changed. the current form gets us 2 titles: one for <a> (=page/post title) and one for <img> (=image title).