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One great new feature in Symbiostock 2.0 is the keywording and renaming of thumbnails for Symbiostock products based on the title. Now, when you upload an image or re-title an image, the thumbnail will automatically get renamed and keyworded in accordance with this.
This can be enabled and disabled globally (Symbiostock > Settings) and on an individual product basis.
This will heavily improve SEO in regards to Google images where your thumbnails will likely get a boost.
There is one caveat of this feature – if you use a Symbiostock product’s image in a blog post, or in another part of your site, if the title is renamed and the thumbnail therefore renamed, any hard-coded references to that image will no longer work.
Although in my opinion since the images are stored in the database there should be no hard-coding to them to begin with, this is unfortunately the way a lot of components within WordPress operate, so the best method to deal with it is to download the thumbnail and re-upload it as a new image in whatever component you are using it in.
If, however, you want to retain full control of what images get renamed when, just disable it on a global basis and enable it on an individual product basis when you want the thumbnail to reflect the change in the title.
Does this work retrospectively – ie can I rename all my thumbnails that are already live? And, is that a good idea bearing in mind that many of them will already be indexed by Google and the search engines?
Steve
You can – in fact, the best way to do it is probably to just re-save them in bulk with the rewriting option enabled.
I can’t guarantee anything with the second question, but I personally am going to rename everything. I think in the long run the SEO benefits will outweigh the short term re-indexing cost.
How do you cause the resaving of all the thumbnails with this new SEO information? I see the setting “Sync thumbnails to titles” and it is selected, but what causes the retro renaming?
Steve
Just saving the product does it automatically if that is enabled. It checks to see if the filename of the thumbnail is the same as the title of the product – if not, it renames. Basically it is built into the saving mechanism automatically now.
There is one caveat of this feature – if you use a Symbiostock product’s image in a blog post, or in another part of your site, if the title is renamed and the thumbnail therefore renamed, any hard-coded references to that image will no longer work.
I like this new feature that image titles are included in thumbnail images’ filenames. However, I noticed that when image title is changed, the thumbnail is renamed (for example from format 88612868211.jpg to image-title-123.jpg) and old one doesn’t exist anymore, but the resized versions of the old thumbnail still exist (format: 88612868211.jpg-150×150.jpg, 88612868211.jpg-260×173@2x.jpg etc.). I think those should be renamed or deleted also.
I’ll probably add a cleanup function that can be run periodically to remove all extraneous files like these.
You are quite astute Henri – you’ve caught many little things here and there that were minor oversights, and it’s been very helpful. I’m going to do as you suggested and add a cleanup function that will purge the old filenames.
Thank you!
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