Is it possible to create an xml file (rss) from a folder of images?

[Betty]

What I need: to create an xml file from a folder of images (either online or offline - doesn't matter). An RSS feed would be fine - although a one time import is what I'm planning on doing with the file.

Is this even possible?

I read I could use excel to sort of accomplish this - but I can't insert images into cells in excel.

What I'm trying to accomplish: I have a large number of images that need to be part of a wordpress site. Each image needs to be a separate post - and it's time consuming to do this one photo at a time.

I know I can use RSS feeds to accomplish this and can do it actually, using Picasa webalbum which has an RSS feature. I can create the xml file with that and import it - creating the posts. The only problem is that each photo, and comments, are a part of picasa and not the website. Clicking the photo to enlarge it, for example, links me to the picasa web album. So - that doesn't actually work.

I'm not very familiar with RSS / xml stuff - so any point in the right direction would be great.

Thanks!

[Ghoulish Delight]

An RSS/xml file will not actually contain the images, just links to the images (RSS/xml is just formatted text, nothing else). So without spending the time to actually upload the files to your WP site, it's not going to work.

If you have access to the server the site is hosted on, you could upload all of the images directly, then create an RSS file with the image location data. This is where Excel (and a tool like this one) could be helpful. Just add the info for each post, including an img link to each photo that you uploaded to the server, create the RSS file (which is nothing more than an XML file that follows some standards) and you'd be ready to import it into Wordpress.

But depending on how much sense that all made to you, it may be less work to just go ahead and grind through manually creating the posts.

[Betty]

Okay - just clicked with me. I'm not inserting a picture. I'm inserting a link. Der! Sometimes I can't see the forest for the trees, I swear.

Thank you. That does almost what I need it to do. I may be able to tweak it and add additional fields including one to hold the url to the jpg.

[Ghoulish Delight]

I was able to get it working by adding an html img tag to the "Description" field.

e.g. <img src="http://loungeoftomorrow.com/LoT/images/misc/vbulletin3_logo_white.gif">


That created a post with the image in-line. You can add any html data to that field. For example if you want the image to link to something:

<a href="http://www.whatever.com"><img src="http://loungeoftomorrow.com/LoT/images/misc/vbulletin3_logo_white.gif"></a>

[Betty]

Thanks!

That along with a plug in that will take the first photo and use it for the featured image will solve my problem. Yay!

Much better than doing this all by hand and I'll be able to use it in the future I can tell already.

[Stan4dSteph]

You might look into ifttt.com to see if it can help with this or other automated tasks. It connects a lot of different social media sites together. Pretty nifty.