Title and metadata of images in Media Library when images are the same

No one can answer your SEO questions with certainty. The few Google engineers who truly know are not talking. The rest of us are speculating based on past experience. Our collective experience could become invalid tomorrow if Google introduces a new algorithm.

The actual filenames of course must be unique. WP will automatically rename new uploads that have existing filenames. Google does complain when there are redundant page titles on your site, so the title tag content in the page’s head section should be unique. There is apparently focus on the first H1 tag on a page as well, so a unique title here is probably a good idea. Other titles on a page probably don’t matter much, these can be likely be redundant.

What you might want to try is give pages whatever redundant title you like, and ensure all related pages all have the same canonical URL specified in the head section. Of course the filenames and page slug must be unique no matter what, but Google will assume all pages with the same canonical URL are essentially the same page. It will then only index the canonical version and ignore the rest. Of course, having the other pages not be indexed needs to be OK with you for this scheme to work.

WP will save some metadata for every upload no matter what, but you do not need to specify additional metadata if you will have no need for it.

You do need leading zeros in any numbering scheme so order is maintained in an alphabetical sort. Use as many places as necessary to cover any likely number of items. If you are sure there will never be more than 99 items, number them 01, 02, 03,… etc.

Hi bcworkz,

I recently learnt that whenever you upload an image to the WordPress Media library wordpress actually creates a page to go along with the image. This ‘Attachment Page’ I had always ignored until I looked a bit closer. But this is great because now I can create a singular page such as a ‘Gallery’ page and have a bunch of thumbnails on it (with pagination for this page) and then in each of those thumbnails I set to “link to attachment page”.

There is no need for me to manually create WP pages for each image upload which is what I was doing before to create these ‘link to’ pages for each image because its already created automatically. This attachment page working as a predefined layout displays the image and the standard WP metadata ‘Description’ text I entered and also has its own template file in the standard WP “Twenty” themes at least i.e Twenty Fourteen that contain functions suited to the display of media related info to present to people who might view and browse such an image gallery. for example next and previous button like a gallery browse.

So with ‘image 1’ upload for example I have a URL ready to go:
https://www.mydomain.com/gallery/atmosphere-processors-plain-01/

In the “Edit Media” screen of the image in WP Media Library I can now add to the standard WP metadata for every upload with my own metadata (using a custom fields plugin because I’m not a programmer) and these show up in the attachment page and enable me to add additional content about each image like author, medium, type of work, and copyright details as well as a small story or background on the image in a text area field. Whoever thought of this attachment page idea in the WP camp has a vision. Its helped me automate the creation of image gallery and combine interesting associated textual information.

I read up on canonical URL after your reply and this is what I need. On support.google.com this put my mind at ease: “There are valid reasons why your site might have different URLs that point to the same page, or have duplicate or very similar pages at different URLs”. Mine is the second category in this statement.

https://www.mydomain.com/gallery/atmosphere-processors-plain-01/
https://www.mydomain.com/gallery/atmosphere-processors-plain-02/
https://www.mydomain.com/gallery/atmosphere-processors-plain-03/

Later I will specify the canonical url to be first image and the others ignored. The first has all the custom fields on it, is the only one linked from ‘gallery’, and the others are accessible only as popup images in a lightbox once on the attachment page #1. not as their own pages.

For now I will continue to get my site developed and then later check what google identifies is the best version using their URL Inspection Tool. Then I will follow your method outlined for specifying precisely the canonical URL in the head if google has the wrong page I want.

What you said about the leading zeros was exactly my thoughts as well, otherwise it jumps around. But I notice that in the WordPress system (I forget where now, but in creating new posts I think) they don’t use the zero, and it does look better as “-1” than “-01” because its less busy to look at. But the problem is in sorting above 10 items. So I think I will use the zero because sorting is important I hate it when a file is stuck somewhere else in a list and you have to hunt for it.

thanks!

I’m glad you discovered a built in feature that works for you! I’m sorry I neglected to mention attachment pages, but I had thought you were using them already and that you were fiddling with the template file to achieve the titling, captions, meta data, etc.

It looks like WP does not automatically insert canonical link tags for attachment pages, which is good because they wouldn’t be what you want anyway. To insert canonical link tags, you will need a bit of custom code that hooks the “wp_head” action and outputs the desired HTML. I know you’re not a programmer, but try not to be put off by any mention of custom code. Anyone with reasonable attention to detail can manage some basic coding without becoming a programmer.

You might consider NOT using a numeric suffix on the primary, canonical image title and only apply the numbers to the other related image titles. The non-numeric title will still sort first, and it should make it easier to insert the proper canonical link on each page. You can start numbering the second image with 01 or 02, it doesn’t matter as long as the sequence is maintained. For example, a series of titles might be Foobar, Foobar-01, Foobar-02, Foobar-03, etc. Because “Foobar” would be the canonical title, it is easily determined by code on other pages by simply stripping from the current title any trailing numeric characters along with the associated hyphen.

There is a PHP function that lets us search and remove variable elements determined by complex criteria like “only match 2 numeric characters that occur at the end of a string”: preg_replace()

I realize that asking someone to learn programming is a tall order, but learning enough coding to do one specific task is attainable by almost anyone. It’s mainly about not being afraid to make mistakes and how to recover when they happen. While I’m not going to write code for you, I’ll be happy to help you figure out what you need to do. Time enough for all of this later. I just wanted to let you know that your discovery of attachment pages isn’t letting you off the hook of needing to do some coding ??