👆🏼 Need decent Alt Text support in Pika. That's the one thing I seem to be missing. That, and maybe a lightbox feature for photos.

@pratik @maique I’ve been using Imagekit.io for years to host my blog’s images and have never paid them anything. (For HeyDingus, not my Micro.blog)

@pratik @maique I’ve been using Imagekit.io for years to host my blog’s images and have never paid them anything. (For HeyDingus, not my Micro.blog)

@pratik @maique I’ve been using Imagekit.io for years to host my blog’s images and have never paid them anything. (For HeyDingus, not my Micro.blog)

@pratik @maique @jarrod That’s a pretty good idea! That would make things easier.

@pratik @jarrod Not sure if that makes sense, for my use case. I have all the photos safely stored in Flickr, and iCloud. As far as I could gather from the email exchange with Pika, photos from the old blog can even be pulled when importing.

Alt Text, on the other hand, seems impossible to set. The caption is not, of course, meant to be Alt Text, but gets crossposted as such. And are also “content”, as far as EchoFeed goes. The crossposted posts look really odd.

@pratik @maique if you upload multiple photos at once or move them together it makes them smaller and puts them
Together in a grid.

@maique No Alt Text support? That’s a big ol’ bummer.

@maique No Alt Text support? That’s a big ol’ bummer.

@maique No Alt Text support? That’s a big ol’ bummer.

@maique How are you uploading your photos? Are you resizing/recompressing them before uploading them? Using a standard size or anything?

@jarrod @pratik The 25GB bandwidth they mention on the free tier is per month? Or lifetime, like a trial?

@daveycraney No compression. Always full size. Always have.

@maique Pretty sure it’s per month. As far as I know, I’ve never come close to any limit. Granted, I post a fraction of the photos that you do, but for all of December my bandwidth was 6.1 GB.

@jarrod As far as I can tell. You get a caption, but those are two totally different things. The Alt Text that makes it’s way is always “Image with caption: {caption}”.

On top of that, the EchoFeed <<content>> variable, the only one I need, assumes the captions as text, so I get odd posts with the text I want, and then four random lines with the captions. And I’m not one for captions.

Maybe @bjhess can chime in.

@jarrod I’m sure you have a LOT more visitors than I do, but that’s good to know.

@maique I upload everything using their API via a shortcut, surprising no one. But it’s been rock solid for years. Truly a set it and forget it solution. (I honestly forgot they even had usage limits until I looked at my dashboard just now.)

@maique As part of the process, I do run images through TinyPNG before they upload. Another consideration if you’re going full-size.

@daveycraney @pratik That is exactly the situation where I missed having a lightbox. They’re tiny.

@jarrod I will give them a look, for sure. Thanks again, and I might come back later, looking for that shortcut.

@pratik I wrote this about the shortcut back in 2021. I’ve improved it a bit since then but this is the gist! (It should look familiar — it’s served as the foundation for all my shortcuts that upload stuff to Micro.blog.)

@maique Anytime! Happy to help.

@pratik @maique Oh, and yeah, I had my Drafts actions set up so I could choose whether it was uploading to Micro.blog or Imagekit.

@pratik @maique Oh, and yeah, I had my Drafts actions set up so I could choose whether it was uploading to Micro.blog or Imagekit.

@pratik @maique Oh, and yeah, I had my Drafts actions set up so I could choose whether it was uploading to Micro.blog or Imagekit.

@pratik @jarrod @daveycraney Regarding Markdown support, they talk about it in The Manual (https://pika.page/manual). When it comes to images, there’s a note in the “Known Quirks” section:

> While Pika recognizes most Markdown formatting, it cannot currently process image syntax.

@pratik @jarrod @daveycraney I don’t mind having the images there. Heck, I want them to be there… 😂

@pratik @jarrod @daveycraney I was under the impression it would be a very straightforward thing, but it keeps failing.

The fact that I have 11k+ posts, but only around 30 are showing is scarier.

@pratik Thanks! I’m glad it worked for you.

• I think back then I was under the impression that PNGs were more web-friendly, even for photos. And it’s never caused an issue for me, so I’ve never thought to change it.

• I wanted people to have an easy way to see the full-size image file, so linking back to it was my brute force solution.

@pratik I need the simple one for now, .wxr (?). The Wordpress one. It’s the one needed to import to Pika.

@pratik I’m not sure about folders. Probably their API allows it, but I never go back into Imagekit for anything, so it all just lives in one bucket.

This version that I use, but haven’t polished or added the library, does include support for the alt text generator.

@pratik I think because I didn’t want people to have to download and configure another app to make my shortcuts work. But for personal use it’s pretty awesome.

Looks like yes on 5GB. After 4 years, I’m at 220MB stored, so quite a bit of runway at my current pace.

@pratik That’s what I expected, a small file. Waiting for the official help 🙂

@pratik Good to know, thank you!

I should have a backup at GitHub, now that I think about it. I remember turning it ON years ago.

@pratik It is not. Just checked.

@maique @jarrod We're hoping to have Alt text soon (finally). An OSS library we depend on for the editor has been working on it over the past month and hopefully we'll be able to bring it in successfully over the coming weeks.

So EchoFeed spits out figcaptions at the end of the content and not inline with the images themselves?

@bjhess That is great to know, I miss that.

EchoFeed does both. We get a “Image with caption: {{caption}}”, and the text of the caption as part of the content. It would be easier with an image, but I edited that.

It’s

Post text bla bla

Image caption

Post text bla bla

Image caption

Image caption.

@jarrod

@maique @jarrod Here to share the good news that alt text has arrived in Pika. Let us know if you see anything amiss!

@goodenoughllc @jarrod Yes! Thank you. I’ll give it a go as soon as I’m back home. Now on daddy duty, hands pretty much tied.