Taxonomy for a collection

Nice to hear from you again. I want to make sure I understand your question.

You wrote “media that belong to the same collection“. Are you referring to a Real Media Library Collection? If so, the answer is no, RML collections are implemented with plugin-specific database tables and do not use WordPress taxonomies. In RML, media items belong to folders or galleries; collections do not contain them directly.

If your collections come from a different source, give me the details so I can respond more specifically. Thanks for your continued interest in MLA.

I might have confused myself here due to being hands off with my site for an extended period creating content. I think you’ve provided the answer already,

Instead of renaming the Title, you can assign a common Att. Tag value for each set of images you want to group and then use the taxonomy query features of MLA to retrieve them. Or, you could define a custom field for each set of items and use the custom field query feature to compose the gallery

David Lingren

https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/gallery-that-uses-the-image-title/

At the time my Att. tag was ‘portrayal: nebula stars dust’ so I would subtly revise this to ‘collection: nebula stars dust’ with your provided PHP.

As I’ve since discovered, I would like to use the collection name in my WP admin and some places on the front end so perhaps the custom field approach might work nicely here. If I create a custom text field in Advanced Custom Fields plug-in called ‘collection name’ can we use this instead.

Do I just create the one custom field as is normal, or does a custom field need to be created for each collection (if this is the case then I’m not sure I could use the custom field value as mentioned above throughout my site as effectively).

Cheers,

Thanks for the additional information and the link to the earlier topic.

It looks like you can create one custom field, and you don’t need to use ACF unless you want to. You can go to the Edit Media page for one of your images, scroll down to the Custom Fields and look for the “Add New Custom Field:” area. Click the “Enter new” button, give the field a name and value, e.g., “Collection” and “nebula stars dust”, and click “Add Custom Field”. Once the field appears in a Media Library item it will be added to the “Name” dropdown control for you. You may need to pull down the “Screen Options” menu and check the Custom Fields box to see the area.

You can compose a gallery with something like:

[mla_gallery meta_key="Collection" meta_value="nebula stars dust"]

I am marking this topic resolved, but please update it if you have any problems or further questions regarding the above suggestions.