Programmatically Inserting Photos Into ACF Gallery Field, But….

• jeffthefish

• February 13, 2016 at 8:32 am

…only the first photo shows up.

I have a script that is supposed to upload photos from an external url, match them to the post it should belong to in WordPress, add them as a WP attachment, and then add the attachments to the gallery ACF field.

And it works fine, except, when I go to the post in question in wp-admin, only the first photo in the gallery is actually in the gallery. If I check the database, I see no differences between the first photo and the rest of the photo, nor between manually uploaded gallery images and these. I have no idea what the disconnect is.

Here is the relevant code:

$uploads_dir = $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . "2016.website.com/trunk/www/wp-content/uploads/condos" . "/" . $photo["photo"];
    $url = "http://www.website.com/images/custom/condos/{$photo["photo"]}";
    //$uploads_dir = $uploads_dir . "/" . $photo["photo"];
    file_put_contents($uploads_dir, file_get_contents($url));

    //attach the photos to the post
    // Check the type of file. We'll use this as the 'post_mime_type'.
    $filetype = wp_check_filetype( basename( $uploads_dir ), null );

    // Get the path to the upload directory.
    $wp_upload_dir = wp_upload_dir();

    // Prepare an array of post data for the attachment.
    $attachment = array(
        'guid'           => $wp_upload_dir['url'] . '/' . basename( $uploads_dir ), 
        'post_mime_type' => $filetype['type'],
        'post_title'     => preg_replace( '/\.[^.]+$/', '', basename( $uploads_dir ) ),
        'post_content'   => '',
        'post_status'    => 'inherit'
    );

    $attach_id = wp_insert_attachment( $attachment, $uploads_dir, $post[0]->ID );
    require_once( ABSPATH . 'wp-admin/includes/image.php' );
    $attach_data = wp_generate_attachment_metadata( $attach_id, $uploads_dir );
    wp_update_attachment_metadata( $attach_id, $attach_data );

    //insert the ACF magic bits
    update_field("field_5693402ab8561", $attach_id, $post[0]->ID );

}

At my wit’s end here. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

• John Huebner

• February 14, 2016 at 12:39 am

A gallery field in ACF stores an array of image IDs. I believe that the following line overwrites what’s stored with the new value each time.

update_field("field_5693402ab8561", $attach_id, $post[0]->ID );

You will need to get what’s already in the field, append the new image to the array and then update it. Something like this might work.

$array = get_field('field_5693402ab8561', $post[0]->ID, false);
if (!is_array($array)) {
  $array = array();
}
$array[] = $attach_id;
update_field('field_5693402ab8561', $array, $post[0]->ID );

• phylaxis

• February 21, 2017 at 9:59 am

I am in the process of needing to do something very similar to this. Did this end up working for you @jeffthefish?

• tabboy

• December 7, 2018 at 7:33 pm

It almost works but because he is missing the “not” operator it fails to add the first entry. Here is the pseudo code.

$gallery_array = get_field($key, $post_id, false);

if (!is_array($gallery_array )) {
	$gallery_array = array();
}

$gallery_array [] = $img_attachment_id;
update_field($key, $gallery_array , $post_id);

• John Huebner

• December 8, 2018 at 12:03 am

Sorry about the type in my code above, sometimes when I’m typing code into a comment here I can miss important things. A missing ! completely changes how it will work. I have edited my original comment.