Indexer, Preview, and more in Image Source Control 3.0

I got some often-requested features with the release of Image Source Control 3.0. Let’s get right into them.

Indexer to scan your site

Image Source Control indexes your site to understand which images are used where. This index is used when building overviews like the Global List and pre-filtering potential unused images.

Until now, the index was built with each visit of a page in the frontend, which, depending on the traffic on your website, could take a while.

The new Indexer page will now scan your site in one go. I’d recommend using it when going through a longer list of unused images or when making many changes to update the Global List.

Since the index is helpful when using image sources as well as unused images, you can reach the dedicated page in two ways:

• Media > Unused Images > Run Indexer (button at the top left)
• Media > Image Sources > Post Index > Run indexer

The Indexer “visits” your website like a regular visitor but tries to call an uncached version of each page.

I also used this chance to introduce the new table isc_index to store the image-post relations.

Modules

The original reason for rewriting a lot of plugin code, which resulted in this major release, was the idea to decouple the various feature sets in Image Source Control. Some users only want to handle image captions, while others want to manage unused images.

You will now find a new settings section under Settings > Image Sources^(?) to only enable the features you are looking for.

Preview image source texts

In the Media Library list view, you will now find the new Image Sources column with a preview of the image caption text.

The column is optional and can be disabled in the Screen Options at the top right of the screen. The content adjusts dynamically when you change fields in the Image Source Form column.

Filter images by sources

The Media Libary list view now also features a filter by image source status. This allows you to quickly identify images without entering image source information.

Fixed Image captions and Lazy Loading

Lazy loading and other plugins that manipulated the image’s src attribute prevented captions from showing up.

Until now, this problem required custom solutions for each lazy loading plugin.

Starting with version 3.1.0, ISC looks for valid image URLs in other attributes in the code and will work without customizations.

Developers: test your custom codes

Suppose you developed custom features that hook into Image Source Control or have received custom code from our support. In that case, you need to test it carefully since I moved many classes and functions around.

The ISC_Class, one of the significant classes in the plugin often referenced in custom code was deprecated.

Other changes

Image Source Control now recognizes the AVIF image format.

Other than this, there were a lot of compatibility fixes and code updates that no one might notices, but that improved the code quality.

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