RSS Album Feeds

Backlight 4, 5 & 6 Support
#1

When I look at an album feed in a feed reader…

If the image has no title metadata then the title in the feed is shown as “Untitled”
How do I prevent this such that if no title metadata is provided for an image the feed displays an empty title, i.e. no title?

Also, if the image has no title metadata then at the bottom of the photo displayed in the feed shows the filename. How do I prevent the feed from showing the filename?

If the image has title metadata, then at the bottom of the photo displayed in the feed shows " title / title"
i.e. it shows the title metadata twice. How do I prevent it from showing a double title or prevent it from showing anything at the bottom of a photo in the feed?

#2

RSS feeds are not user customizable in the way that you’re asking.

Also, you need to look at the feed itself, not how it appears in your feed reader. There are lots of feed readers, and they can and do do whatever they want with the raw data. We cannot account for that.

What we can do, and have done, is work very hard to ensure that the RSS feed itself is complete and well formed, such that any and all feed readers should be able to do a reasonably good job at displaying the feed, individual developers notwithstanding.

For example, here’s a feed for one of my personal albums:

https://campagna.photography/galleries/_recent/feed

And, for convenience, here’s a snippet of the head and first two items of that feed:

<rss xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" version="2.0">
<channel>
<title>Campagna Photography - Recent Work</title>
<atom:link href="https://campagna.photography/galleries/_recent/feed" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"/>
<link>https://campagna.photography/galleries/_recent/</link>
<description/>
<item>
<title>Untitled</title>
<description><p><a href="https://campagna.photography/galleries/_recent/mc-20211030-182216-single" title="Recent Work"><img src="https://campagna.photography/galleries/_recent/thumbnails/mc-20211030-182216.jpg" width="156" height="250" alt="" /></a></p><p>October 30, 2021. </p></description>
<link>https://campagna.photography/galleries/_recent/mc-20211030-182216-single</link>
<pubDate>Sun, 31 Oct 2021 07:04:47 +0000</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>Untitled</title>
<description><p><a href="https://campagna.photography/galleries/_recent/mc-20211030-182351-single" title="Recent Work"><img src="https://campagna.photography/galleries/_recent/thumbnails/mc-20211030-182351.jpg" width="250" height="156" alt="" /></a></p><p>October 30, 2021. </p></description>
<link>https://campagna.photography/galleries/_recent/mc-20211030-182351-single</link>
<pubDate>Sun, 31 Oct 2021 07:04:47 +0000</pubDate>
</item>

This is exactly what we want it to be.

#3

Feeds need a title. Empty fields are, insofar as I am aware, considered by invalid. Depending on how your feed reader displays titles, not having a title could be problematic in a number of ways, for example, if the title is meant to be clickable, but the title is empty, then there’s nothing to click on, making the entire field useless.

#4

Thanks Matthew.
Sure, every image should have a title metadata.

I’ve looked at the RSS xml and can now see whats happening.

In my template settings for the Default Album>Photo Presentation>Caption for the token I inserted {Title} because in the web page slideshow view I wanted the title displayed below the image. However, when you do this the RSS feed inserts an html paragraph to the item tag which is

Title / Title

, hence why in a RSS feed reader it displays the Title twice at the bottom of the displayed image.

Let’s say in the Caption token you insert {D3} only. The RSS feed then inserts in the item tag

Title / D3

So, Title is always added in the RSS feed if a caption token is applied.

I can see it makes sense, because normally I guess the purpose would be to show the image caption and not some other meta data. Whereas I set the caption to {Title} because I wanted it displayed when viewing a web page.

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