Photo and Video Posts on the IndieWeb

So, I did not know this, but microformat parsers tend to treat photo (and video) posts a bit differently. Turns out you should not just add u-photo to every image in a post! (I mean, I never actually did, but this was still new to me.)

Long story short: if you want h-feed aggregators to display your post in an Instagram-like manner, u-photo is probably in order. (The same goes for u-video, by the way.)

Also, the image doesn’t have to be inside e-content! In fact, most parsers will actually remove it from the e-content, which they’ll then treat as the image’s “caption”—again, think Instagram. (No worries, the image itself is still going to be displayed, typically below the, uh, “caption.” Like, that’s why it’s removed from the content, to avoid duplicate images.)

(Here, too, I’ve always had my u-photo images outside of my e-content. Wasn’t until I started looking into other people’s posts that I noticed this behavior.)

Fun fact: parsers are a bit inconsistent here, it seems.

X-Ray, which powers Aperture, removes all img tags if at least one u-photo is present. (It also removes all video tags, simply because it doesn’t yet support video. It does, however, recognize u-video, so that clients are still able to display videos the same way they display photos. The same happens to [equally unsupported] picture elements.)

Fun fact: my reader—still a work in progress—runs on X-Ray, too, but I have added HTML5 element support. Which means video and picture are no longer automatically stripped—I don’t want them to. Which means I will have to “actively” remove them, but only for photo and video posts, of course. *phew*

Anyway, as an example: if you’re using img and u-photo inside a figure with figcaption, that is going to get displayed pretty funky for a whole lot of folks.

Indigenous seems to just move all images to the bottom of a post, regardless of its post type.

Oh, and you can have multiple u-photo images. They’ll be displayed in a gallery of sorts. But they, too, will probably disappear from your e-content, at least for h-feed followers.

And just when I thought I had it figured out, I stumbled upon Jeremy Keith’s Summertime in England, which is sort of an article and a photo post at the same time. It works in this case, though, because of how carefully written that post is.