Read Adobe XMP / XML in PHP

April 9, 2013Updated on January 20, 2020 JS Morisset PHP, WordPress

I’ve found a few snippets of PHP code to read XMP / XML meta data from an image file, but none that I would call very robust or efficient. I ended up writing my own for Underwater Focus, and I’m quite pleased with the result. In fact, after adding support for a shortcode, I packaged it as an Adobe XMP plugin for WordPress.

The first part of using XMP meta data is reading the XMP information from the image. I’ve seen a few solutions that read the whole file into memory, and others that read-in just a small part. If the XMP / XML contains a lot of information, that small part may be incomplete. And each time the XMP meta data is required, the original (and sometimes quite large) image file must be re-read. Since the XMP doesn’t change unless the original image is updated, there’s no reason to keep re-reading the same large file time and time again.

Adobe XMP with an Hierarchical Subject Array in PHP

January 7, 2013Updated on November 2, 2013 JS Morisset PHP

This morning I had a bit of a challenge parsing Adobe XMP information for images on Underwater Focus. The Adobe XMP is too complex for SimpleXML, and anyway, I only needed a few values — one of them, the LightRoom hierarchicalSubject keywords, is the reason I’m sharing some of the code I wrote.

Using regular expressions to get at single values is quick and easy, but I wanted to create arrays for rdf:li values, and split each lr:hierarchicalSubject keyword into an additional second-dimension array.

Memcached vs Disk Cache

December 4, 2012Updated on November 2, 2013 JS Morisset HTTP Server, PHP, UNIX (Generic)

I recently added some disk caching for MySQL queries, WordPress objects, PHP opcode, and PHP web pages on my server. There are several different caching techniques and applications available, and memcached seems like one of the more popular ones. Right or wrong, it appears to be the default go-to for many developers these days.

Since I’m a SysAdmin by profession (with maybe a penchant for scripting and integration), I tend to have a more “systems” oriented approach — which led me to first consider, and then choose disk caching over memcached. In this post, I’ll outline the reasons I chose disk caching, and why in most circumstances it might be superior to memcached.

WordPress Caching and Plugins for Performance

December 1, 2012Updated on September 30, 2019 JS Morisset HTTP Server, PHP, WordPress

Over the past few weeks I’ve been looking at different solutions to improve the speed of my WordPress websites. The first step was to mirror and redirect the static content to another server (aka Content Delivery Network or CDN). I’m currently using a DreamHost VM, but I may look into using Amazon S3 as well. This is an easy way to save bandwidth, and off-load a web server that is configured for dynamic content (larger and slower). In the case of PHP and WordPress, there are several additional options available to improve local web server performance. I’ll describe the ones I’m currently using, including their expected impact to performance and short-comings. This article deals mainly with the local Apache Httpd and PHP configuration. There are additional infrastructure solutions that can improve performance, like using Nginx servers on the front, Varnish cache servers in the middle, and Apache Httpd on the back-end (for PHP and WordPress). This post is only about optimizing the Apache Httpd back-end. If you’re considering adding a Varnish server in front of Apache Httpd, you should probably avoid caching whole pages in Apache Httpd and leave that to the Varnish servers.