Getting the image count in WordPress

A long time ago I had a bit of an issue on how to get the image count from a post. At the time there wasn’t a way that I could think of to properly getting all the needed information; but then again I didn’t know as much as I do now.

I wanted to revisit this because I know it will help out at least one person if not more.

Since the last time I brought up the topic of multiple galleries in one post a lot has changed and a few new functions were added to help solve the dilemma. The key one that helped is: get_post_galleries

It was a simple idea but for some reason at the time it kept only giving my brain a beating. The reason was because it wouldn’t give the correct image count.

New solution

Up until now I was a little confused how I would solve my issue. I knew I needed to get all the galleries and then I needed to get all the images in those galleries. So, here is what I did:

// Get all the galleries in the current post
$galleries = get_post_galleries( get_the_ID(), false );
// Count all the galleries
$total_gal = count( $galleries );
/**
 * count all the images
 * @param array $array The array needed
 * @return int returns the number of images in the post
 */
function _get_total_images( $array ){
    $key = 0;
    $src = 0;
    while ( $key < count( $array ) ){
        $src += count( $array[$key]['src'] );
        $key++;
    }
    return intval( $src );
}

echo _get_total_images( $galleries );

As you can see it really isn’t much code. Part of that reason I wanted to keep the code as simple as possible. Feel free to extend it. In fact, I encourage you to do it.

How it works

What’s nice about the way I went about it is that it will require at least WordPress 3.6 and higher or else you will get an error. Nobody wants those, right?

The first thing we did was create a holder for all the galleries with the get_post_galleries function. We then count how many galleries there are and store that in another variable. That way we can use that later on to output the number if we want. Some people like that sort of thing.

Line 10 is where it goes a little different. I know you’re wondering why I’m declaring a function and then echoing that function in the last line. Part of that reason is because I wanted the ability for child themes to easily filter the text that I would use. Yes, I am aware I didn’t include any text strings. I’m pretty sure you can guess what it would say though, right?

Now, with that little tidbit in your arsenal go and read some code from the includes folder. You won’t be let down.