Setting up PhotoBlogs: MTEmbedImage

January 11th, 2005

Setting up PhotoBlogs: MTEmbedImage

Ok, I’ve spent several hours to get MTEmbedImage (a thumbnail tool for Movabletype) working, so I thought I’ll share it with the world.

The stumbling blocks were these:

The basename of MTEmbedImage is from the Movabletype directory, and not from the blog (like someone stated in the comments of MTEmbedImage)
When I copy-pasted some code into the textarea of Movabletype, then it ended up utf8-encoded. I just saw this when I copy-pasted it into my editor to write an email concerning this plugin that didn’t work..

Finally, here is my code:

<div class="photo"> <MTEmbedImage basename="../photos/archives/[MTEntryExcerpt].jpg" default="default" height="160" thumbsuffix="-160"> <a href="<$MTEntryPermalink valid_html="1"$>" class="noborder"> <img src="/mt/<MTEmbedImageThumbFilename>" alt="<$MTEntryTitle$>" height="<MTEmbedImageThumbHeight>" width="<MTEmbedImageThumbWidth>" /> </a> </MTEmbedImage> </div>

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9 Comments »

Thanks for your comment. The MTEmbedImage plugin was somewhat complicated. I really wish that developers would always place a handful of very different implementation examples so that the user would be able to see the usage and be able to customize based upon the examples.

I ended up using the code twice like this on my individual entry archive. The javascript swaps images.

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE=javascript>
<!--
function swap(photo){
document['mainphoto'].src =  photo;
return;
}
//-->
</SCRIPT>

<MTPhotoGallery exclude="-thumb" silent="1" path="images/[MTEntryID]">
    <MTEmbedImage basename="[MTPhotoGalleryImagePath]/[MTPhotoGalleryImageFileName]" width="70" thumbsuffix="-thumb">
       <a href="javascript:swap('/china/<MTEmbedImageFilename>')">
          <img src="/china/<MTEmbedImageThumbFilename>"
             width="<MTEmbedImageThumbWidth>"
             height="<MTEmbedImageThumbHeight>"/>
       </a>
    </MTEmbedImage>
</MTPhotoGallery>

<MTPhotoGallery exclude="-thumb" silent="1" path="images/[MTEntryID]" count="1" sort_order="ascend">
    <MTEmbedImage basename="[MTPhotoGalleryImagePath]/[MTPhotoGalleryImageFileName]" width="70" thumbsuffix="-thumb">
          <img src="/china/<MTEmbedImageFilename>"
             width="<MTEmbedImageWidth>"
             height="<MTEmbedImageHeight>"
             name="mainphoto" />
    </MTEmbedImage>
</MTPhotoGallery>

Comment by beausmith — February 11, 2005 12:20 pm #comment-3

Thank you for your code example..! And wish you pleasant stay in china..!

Comment by Philipp Keller — February 11, 2005 12:36 pm #comment-4

So I have been struggling with MTEmbedImage all night.
Where is your photos directory?
My pictures are stored in
../twenty-five.net/Blog_files/
Movable type is here:
../twenty-five.net/Movabletype/
Yet even when I put a *.jpg in the Movabletype directory and try the following code:
or any other variant, I get nothing. Looking at the source, the whole thing disappears.
I have also tried changing the first line to:
or
and nothing works!
Can anyone help?
Thanks amillion.

Comment by Jennifer — April 6, 2005 5:53 am #comment-37

Jennifer: It seems that your code didn’t make it to the blog.. Could you mail me directly?

Comment by phred — April 13, 2005 6:59 am #comment-49

thanks for the tip, it worked fine here — i just can’t figure out 2 things:

1. how do i make an archive of thumbnail images instead of the boring plain text.

2. where does MTembedimage save my photos? I can’t find them =/

Comment by b. — June 4, 2005 8:50 am #comment-111

Hi Banoota..

1. MTEmbedImage doesn’t help you with doing a “archive page”. It just helps you to automatically scale your images and displaying it properly. You can have archive pages an such by using MTPhotoGallery for instance.
2. MTembedimage does save its sized images in the directory you saved your original image. With a suffix: If you sized your image “photos/myalbum/myphoto.jpg” to 250 pixels horizontal, it will save it to “photos/myalbum/myphoto-250.jpg”.

I cannot help you very much further as I’m not using MTEmbedImage actively as I switched my active blog to Wordpress.

Comment by phred — June 13, 2005 7:00 am #comment-112

Thank you for your useful code! I was wondering if you might have any insight into the problem I’m having. I have been using MTEmbedImage, and it’s working fine for a while, then mysteriously stopped creating thumbnails. It finds the file and will print out any information about it I request using the provided tags, so I can print the full-size image. However, it just will not create a thumbnail! I am at a loss.

I was wondering if it was my permissions, but I have all permissions fully enabled for the folder my photos are in. Do you have any ideas of what I might check? Thanks in advance!

Comment by Sarah — September 30, 2005 6:23 pm #comment-1421

Hmm.. difficult one!
Is your site hosted somewhere or is it on your own server..?
Yeah, I’d also go for the permissions. The perl process probably runs as a different user id as your user..
Disk space shouldn’t be the problem..?

What you could do: Move your already generated thumbnails into a different directory and let MTEmbedImage generate the thumbnails for the old photos.. dunno what that would say but it would be something to investigate :)

Comment by phred — October 4, 2005 7:15 am #comment-1456

can i let this plugin store thumbnails in other folders i specify?

Comment by rambohoho — May 9, 2008 11:42 pm #comment-127447

Then each went to his own home

Philipp Keller's thoughts on tags and other sweets

Setting up PhotoBlogs: MTEmbedImage

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