I’m just starting out with the Tainacan plugin and wanted to know if you could please help me with the integration of the following plugins so that they can be accessed via Tainacan’s interface:
1. ClassifAI (for OCR & AI capabilities)
We are building a music archival site consisting mostly of newspaper and magazine articles (we have thousands) therefore it is necessary for us to have a plugin that can extract the copy from the articles automatically and save it into the metadata for the image. The ClassifAI plugin can achieve this and it also seamlessly creates a short ALT Text description. This type of automation will save us a significant amount of time with population therefore it is key that we’re able to use this plugin. Unfortunately though, ClassifAI cannot process its OCR & AI functions when we upload an image through the Tainacan interface (only when we upload an image via our Media Library). Is there a way to allow ClassifAI to function within Tainacan?
See the ClassifAI plugin in action below on one of our archival images when uploaded via WordPress’ Media Library (it generated the ALT & Description fields automatically):
This plugin may seem a bit redundant because I know within Tainacan I can view all images for one collection in one place,but this plugin allows us to do this at the Media Library folder level. Whenever we upload images to our media library we always organize them into folders so that they are easy to find in the future. This was why I originally reached out asking if Tainacan could allow access to the Media library so that we can pull images from that repository into Tainacan. This way we’d have all images organized in both our WordPress Media Library (using Filebird) and in Tainacan’s interface.
See screenshot below to see the Filebird plugin in action in the Media Library on a site we have built. (For the music archival site that we are building now, we will set up a folder for each musician.)
Can you please tell me if it would be possible to make the Media library accessible to the Tainacan plugin? If so, is this something I can hire your team to help us with OR are you able to provide development guidance on how to achieve this so that my team and I can do the development work on our end?
If it not possible to make the Media library accessible within Tainacan (as at that point all of our images would have the necessary ALT & Description metadata), at the bare minimum, is it possible to allow ClassifAI to work within the Taincan interface?
Many thanks for your consideration of this post! I very much look forward to any of your thoughts and am happy to discuss your questions and thoughts further.
Regarding the Classifai plugin, I’ve started a conversation with them here:
Let’s hope they can provide us some insight. I don’t see a possible future where the same media library that you see in the admin panel would appear inside the Tainacan media modals, due to the same privacy-level arguments that we discussed in the wp forum. My hope is that, due to the fact that Classifai uses WordPress upload hooks, we might be able to make these same hooks available to the uploads made inside Tainacan. So the automatic alt-text and description generation would work inside Tainacan the same way that it does in the wp media library.
One thing to notice here is that Tainacan “items” are a concept a bit wider than “media file”. The images, PDFs, audio, etc, are only the “Document” or the “Attachments” that compose what the item “is”. But the key feature of Tainacan is the creation of the Metadata, which are much more flexible than the media fields. I see a lot of potential in exploring AI solutions to help fill metadata based on the uploaded document. But in this case, I would mean the Description metadata, not the Description field associated to the media image. Mainly because there are other types of metadata (relationship, taxonomy, numeric, compound), that are the real potential of Tainacan’s API and faceted search.
