BV Geotagged Media

Reads EXIF GPS data from uploaded images and writes it onto posts as GeoJSON, then maintains the per-category "journey" lines that connect them.

This is the producer side of the beauVoyage geo pipeline. Everything the bv_map plugin renders — marker positions and journey routes — originates here:

It also owns $special_categories, a global read by three other codebases.

Requirements

• WordPress multisite
• PHP 7.4+ with the exif extension
• WP-GeoMeta — WP_GeoUtil::LineString(), st_startpoint(), st_endpoint()
• voyage plugin — bv_get_adjacent_post()

Both plugin dependencies are now guarded — a missing WP-GeoMeta or voyage makes the geo features go quiet rather than fatal — but the plugin cannot do its job without them.

The $special_categories contract

index.php:14-15 declares, at file scope:

global $special_categories;
$special_categories = array('private','standalone','uncategorized');

so it exists only once this plugin has loaded. It is read by:

• voyage/voyage.php and voyage/includes/tec_hooks.php
• bv_map, via bv_map_special_categories()
• this plugin, in bv_update_catline()

There is no load-order guarantee between plugins. It works today because bv_geotagged_media sorts alphabetically before bv_map and voyage. Both of those now wrap the read in an isset() guard — bv_map/includes/compat.php and voyage's bv_special_categories() — precisely because this owner is unguarded. If this plugin is renamed or deactivated, the global silently disappears.

Layout

index.php                      The whole plugin

Fixed in this pass

The initial commit was a faithful import of what is deployed, with the defects recorded rather than fixed. They are fixed now.

• Special categories were never actually excluded. bv_update_catline() did in_array( $cat, $special_categories_local ) where $cat is a WP_Term object and the array holds slug strings, so the comparison never matched and journey lines were generated for private, standalone and uncategorized too. Now compares $cat->slug with strict in_array(). This changes behaviour on the front end — posts in those three categories will stop contributing to journey lines, which is what the code always meant to do.
• EXIF parsing could fatal on upload. read_gps_location() divided the two halves of each GPS rational without checking the denominator; on PHP 8 that throws DivisionByZeroError and takes down the upload request. All six conversions now go through bv_gtm_exif_rational(), which returns 0.0 for a zero or missing denominator. The function also bails before calling exif_read_data() unless the file is a string, the exif extension is loaded, and isImage() says it is an image — previously it ran on every attachment, returned false for non-images, and then warned on $info['DateTimeOriginal']. datetime is only returned when EXIF has it.
• gtm_plugin_main.php_gentrit deleted (696 lines). It was an abandoned predecessor, never loaded because WordPress only executes .php files. It held superseded copies of read_gps_location, bv_attachment, bv_thumbnailmeta_postmeta, bv_update_gline2, bv_update_catline and bv_get_nghbpost_geom — renaming it to .php would have fatally redeclared about eight functions.
• isImage() / isVideo() restored at source. They are the only two things from that file anything still wanted: voyage's story-list template calls them, and bv_map/includes/compat.php had to reimplement them. Both definitions are now behind function_exists() on both sides, so whichever plugin loads first wins and no coordinated deploy is needed. The new implementation parses the path with wp_parse_url() before taking the extension, so a URL with a query string (photo.jpg?w=300) is classified correctly where the old substring check failed; WEBP was added.
• Removed the no-op transition_post_status hook. bv_thumbnailmeta_postmeta() was attached to both save_post ($post_id, $post, $update) and transition_post_status ($new_status, $old_status, $post). On the latter the first parameter is a status string, so the callback returned immediately — it never did anything. Its re-entrancy remove_action() also omitted the priority 30 it was registered at, so it would not have matched anyway. save_post is unchanged and is the hook that was actually working.
• $special_cat_ids removed. It accumulated with += — union by key — so every element after the first was discarded and it could only ever hold one id. Nothing read it, and it issued three get_category_by_slug() queries at file scope on every request, front-end and admin.
• WP_GeoUtil guarded. bv_update_gline2() now returns early unless the class exists, instead of fatalling on every post save when WP-GeoMeta is deactivated. It also keeps the existing line when LineString() returns empty rather than overwriting good data with nothing — see below.
• bv_get_adjacent_post() guarded, and bv_get_nghbpost_geom()'s signature reordered so the PHP 8.0 deprecation (optional parameter $get_value declared before required parameter $current_post) no longer fires. WP_DEBUG_LOG is on in production, so that was being written to debug.log on every request.
• $special_categories read defensively in this plugin too, via isset()
  • is_array(), matching the guards bv_map and voyage already had.

Known issues

• WP-GeoMeta is hand-patched. wp-geoutil.php:714 adds linestring and point to get_capabilities(). A plugin update reverts it, after which WP_GeoUtil::__callStatic() returns null for LineString() and journey lines quietly stop being written. bv_update_gline2() now preserves the existing line in that case rather than erasing it, but the patch still needs reapplying after any WP-GeoMeta update.
• $special_categories is still an unguarded file-scope global owned by this plugin — see the contract section above. The consumers all guard their reads, so the failure mode is silent rather than fatal.
• Several functions read post meta via magic properties ($current_post->geom_point). That works — WP_Post::__get() falls back to get_post_meta() — but it is undocumented behaviour and reads like an error.
• bv_update_gline2() still carries a large block of commented-out error_log() debugging. Left in place; it documents what was tried against the patched WP-GeoMeta.

License

GPL-2.0-or-later. See LICENSE.

Credits

Lai Consulting Team and Gentrit Biba. Derived from digfish/geotagged-media. Previously hosted at gitlab.com/beauvoyage/bv_geotagged_media.