Command-line uploading

If you’re a site administrator and have access to the server then you can use the ‘addmedia’ task. If you’re just a user and want to upload media by the command line you can. This can be done with the pump.io API. There is p, which will allow you to easily upload media from the command line, follow p’s docs to do that.

To use the addmedia command:

./bin/gmg addmedia username your_media.jpg

This will submit the file “your_media.jpg” to be a media entry associated with the user “username”.

You can get help on all the available options by running:

./bin/gmg addmedia --help

Here’s a longer example that makes use of more options:

./bin/gmg addmedia aveyah awesome_spaceship.png \
    --title "My awesome spaceship" \
    --description "Flying my awesome spaceship, since I'm an awesome pilot" \
    --collection-slug i-m-an-awesome-pilot \
    --license "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/" \
    --tags "spaceships, pilots, awesome" \
    --slug "awesome-spaceship"

You can also pass in the –celery option if you would prefer that your media be passed over to celery to be processed rather than be processed immediately.

Command-line batch uploading

There’s another way to submit media, and it can be much more powerful, although it is a bit more complex.

./bin/gmg batchaddmedia admin /path/to/your/metadata.csv

This is an example of what a script may look like. The important part here is that you have to create the ‘metadata.csv’ file.:

location,dc:title,dc:creator,dc:type
"http://www.example.net/path/to/nap.png","Goblin taking a nap",,"Image"
"http://www.example.net/path/to/snore.ogg","Goblin Snoring","Me","Audio"

The above is an example of a very simple metadata.csv file. The batchaddmedia script would read this and attempt to upload only two pieces of media, and would be able to automatically name them appropriately.

The CSV file

The location column

The location column is the one column that is absolutely necessary for uploading your media. This gives a path to each piece of media you upload. This can either a path to a local file or a direct link to remote media (with the link in HTTP format). As you can see in the example above the (fake) media was stored remotely on “www.example.net”.

Other internal nodes

There are other columns which can be used by the script to provide information. These are not stored as part of the media’s metadata. You can use these columns to provide default information for your media entry, but as you’ll see below, it’s just as easy to provide this information through the correct metadata columns.

  • id is used to identify the media entry to the user in case of an error in the batchaddmedia script.
  • license is used to set a license for your piece a media for MediaGoblin’s use. This must be a URI.
  • title will set the title displayed to MediaGoblin users.
  • description will set a description of your media.
  • collection-slug will add the media to a collection, if a collection with the given slug exists.

Metadata columns

Other columns can be used to provide detailed metadata about each media entry. Our metadata system accepts any information provided for in the RDFa Core Initial Context, and the batchupload script recognizes all of the resources provided within it.

The uploader may include the metadata for each piece of media, or leave them blank if they want to. A few columns from Dublin Core are notable because the batchaddmedia script also uses them to set the default information of uploaded media entries.

  • dc:title sets a title for your media entry.
  • dc:description sets a description of your media entry.

If both a metadata column and an internal node for the title are provided, MediaGoblin will use the internal node as the media entry’s display name. This makes it so that if you want to display a piece of media with a different title than the one provided in its metadata, you can just provide different data for the ‘dc:title’ and ‘title’ columns. The same is true of the ‘description’ and ‘dc:description’.