User Guide

Contents

A guide for shop owners. Version 0.27.1.

A tag such as v1.3 beside a heading shows the version that feature arrived in. Gold marks a feature that needs In Situ Gold, the paid add-on.

What it does

A product photo can’t answer the two questions that stop people buying art: does this suit my room, and how big is it really?

A shopper photographs their own wall. Your print appears on it, to scale, against their paint, their furniture, their light. They can move it, try other sizes and other artwork, and add it to the cart from there.

With In Situ Gold they can hang up to 20 prints at once, drag them around, line them up and space them evenly, and add the whole wall to the cart in one go. That matters for gallery walls. Picking six prints that work together is hard from a grid of thumbnails, and buying them one at a time is worse.

What it can’t do

It isn’t a photorealistic mockup. Prints are drawn flat on the wall, with no frame, no glass and no shadow, so it shows the art in the space rather than the finished, framed result.

Sizes are close, not exact. The scale comes from four corners the shopper places by eye and one thing they measure. Close enough to tell a 16×20 from a 24×36 in their own room, not a replacement for a tape measure. The plugin says so on screen, and you can change that wording.

It doesn’t make room photos. Shoppers use their own, or ones you supply.

What you need

  • WordPress 6.7 or later
  • WooCommerce 10.0 or later
  • PHP 8.3 or later
  • Variable products with a size attribute, for anything shown to scale
  • In Situ Gold, for anything marked Gold

1. Install

In Situ comes as two plugins. In Situ for WooCommerce is free and does the preview. In Situ Gold adds to it, and won’t activate without it. Activate WooCommerce first. WordPress won’t activate In Situ without it.

Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin, choose the zip, install, activate.

If you bought Gold, your download is a package. Open it: the two zips you upload are inside its plugins folder. Upload the free one first, then Gold. Upload the package itself and WordPress says “The package could not be installed. No valid plugins were found.”

2. License Gold v0.19

Your key is on your receipt, and in your account at paperpixelstudio.com.

WooCommerce → In Situ → License

Installing Gold opens this tab. Until a key is activated, Gold’s features stay off and the free plugin works as it did before: one print on the wall, one in the cart. Shoppers see nothing wrong.

Paste the key and click Activate. You’ll get Active on this site and the date updates run to.

Moving to another site

Your license covers a set number of sites, and each activation is tied to one address.

Retiring a site, or changing domain? Click Release this site first. That frees the activation to use elsewhere, and turns Gold’s features off on the old site.

Forget, and the new site tells you: This key has no activations left. Release it from another site first.

Local development sites don’t normally use one up.

Check again

Check again asks the store about your key right now instead of waiting for the next automatic check. It also clears what this site remembers about available versions.

Use it after renewing, after releasing a site, or when you know there’s a new version and this site hasn’t noticed.

When a license expires

Gold keeps working. Gallery walls, saved rooms and product links all carry on, and shoppers see no difference. Only updates stop.

You get one reminder in the admin, with Renew, License settings and Remind me later. Dismiss it and it’s quiet for three months.

Renew, click Check again, and updates come back.

If the store can’t be reached

Nothing happens. An outage or a firewall won’t switch Gold off. Only a real answer from the store changes anything.

What the messages mean

It says What to do
This key has no activations left Release it on a site you no longer use
That key belongs to a different product It’s for something else from the same store
The store does not recognize that key Check for a typo, then check your receipt
This key has been disabled or revoked Get in touch
The store could not confirm this key Usually a network blip. Try Check again later

3. Make the preview page

The preview is a shortcode, so it can go on any page.

  1. WooCommerce → In Situ → Preview page
  2. Use the builder to pick a starting artwork and room, if you want one. Leaving both empty is normal: the shopper chooses.
  3. Copy the shortcode into a page and publish it.

The shortcode

[in_situ_preview]
Attribute What it does
art Opens with this artwork. An attachment ID, or a URL on your own site.
room Opens with this room photo. Same.
art_w The print’s width in inches, if it can’t be read from the product.
art_h The print’s height in inches.

All optional. The builder writes them for you.

Back on Preview page, choose the page you just published under Product page link, and save.

Every product with the preview switched on then carries a link to it, opening with that artwork already hanging. Leave it unset and no link appears. The link’s wording is under Customize text.

4. Turn on a product

Edit a variable product and open the In Situ tab in the Product data box.

  • Room preview switches it on. Off by default.
  • Default artwork is the flat artwork file, not a framed mockup. Every size uses this unless you give it its own.
  • Below those, one row per variation: its Size, the Image it uses, and the Crop needed to fit.

Sizes and cropping

Prints crop from the center to fill the paper. A 3:4 image loses a little at 5×7 and a lot at a square size. The Crop column shows how much.

Losing too much? Give that size its own image. Hover the row, click Choose, and pick a file cropped for that shape. Reset puts it back to the default artwork.

Sizes that can’t be read

The plugin reads each size from the variation’s attribute. “8×10”, “16 x 20” and “11×14 in” all work. Anything it can’t read shows in red and won’t be offered to scale. Rename the attribute, or set the size by hand on the variation.

Seeing everything at once v0.17

WooCommerce → In Situ → Artwork lists every product with the preview switched on and the sizes each one offers. It’s read-only. The settings live on the products.

Products you’ve hidden from the catalog appear here marked Hidden from the catalog, but shoppers are never offered them. Catalog visibility is under Publish → Catalog visibility on the product. Shop and search results and Shop only count as being in the catalog. Search results only and Hidden don’t.

5. Rooms you supply

WooCommerce → In Situ → Rooms

Rooms you add here are offered to everyone, signed in or not. Worth adding even though shoppers can use their own photos: it lets someone try the preview straight away instead of going to find one.

  1. Add a room and choose a photograph. Clear, empty wall works best. A slight angle is fine.
  2. Name it. Shoppers pick from the list by name.
  3. Drag the four points to the wall’s corners, where the ceiling and floor meet its side edges.
  4. Click the ruler and measure something on the wall: a door frame, a window, a light switch. On the wall, not a table in front of it.
  5. Enter the real distance, then Save this room.

The toolbox tells you what’s still missing, and shows the wall’s measured size once you can save.

6. What a shopper does

  1. Chooses a room, or a photo of their own.
  2. Drags the four points to the corners of the wall.
  3. Measures one object on that wall and enters its real size.
  4. Picks artwork and a size, which appears at that scale.
  5. Moves it, swaps it for other artwork or another size, and adds it to the cart.

All of it works from the keyboard, including dragging.

Their own photo

It’s read in their browser and never sent to your shop, and they’re told that. One at a time: a new photo replaces the old one, and it’s gone when they close the page. Photos over 8 MB are turned away, even though nothing is uploaded.

With Gold, signed-in customers can keep theirs. See Saved rooms below.

Shoppers hang up to 20 prints on one wall. They can:

  • add and remove prints with the buttons beside the size
  • select several with Shift, or by dragging a box around them
  • line up their edges or their centers
  • space three or more evenly, across or down
  • add the whole wall to the cart at once

The toolbar shows the wall’s total price. From the keyboard, Shift with Enter adds a print to the selection, and Delete takes down what’s selected.

Saved rooms Gold v0.12

Signed-in customers can keep 6 rooms, with the wall already marked and measured, and come back to them later. Anyone who can manage the shop has no limit.

When they add a wall to the cart, the arrangement is saved with that room, so it’s there next time. If a print has left your shop since, the rest come back and the customer is told how many dropped off.

Guests are offered a link to create an account and keep the room. That link only shows if your shop accepts registrations. Its wording is under Customize text, which is where you’d say whether an account is free.

Photos a customer keeps Gold

Largest file accepted 8 MB
Stored at 2000 px on the longest edge
Kept for 90 days after last use

Uploads are re-encoded, which strips anything hidden in the file, including location. They’re stored outside the media library, and no other customer can see them.

7. Change the wording

WooCommerce → In Situ → Customize text

Every sentence a shopper sees can be replaced. Leave a box empty for the default. Clear a box to go back to it.

Gold’s sentences appear here too, while Gold is active. Wording you give them is kept if you switch Gold off and save this tab.

Some sentences use tokens, filled in when the sentence is shown. Keep the braces.

Token Becomes
{w} the print’s width in inches
{h} the print’s height in inches
{n} the number of prints

8. Translating

No translations ship with the plugins. Each has a template in its languages folder: in-situ-for-woocommerce.pot for the free plugin, and in-situ-gold.pot for Gold.

  1. Open one in Poedit or any PO editor.
  2. Translate, and save as in-situ-for-woocommerce-{locale}.mo (or in-situ-gold-{locale}.mo). For example, in-situ-for-woocommerce-fr_FR.mo.
  3. Put the .mo in wp-content/languages/plugins/. Create the folder if it isn’t there.

Don’t put it in a plugin’s own folder. Updates replace that folder and your translation goes with it. WordPress checks wp-content/languages/plugins/ first, so a file there survives updates and wins.

9. Clean-up v0.24

WooCommerce → In Situ → Clean-up

One box, unticked: Remove everything from the database when this plugin is deleted. It decides for both plugins.

Leave it unticked if you’re reinstalling or moving hosts. Your settings, rooms, wording and product setup survive, and installing again picks up where you left off.

Tick it only when you’re finished with In Situ for good. Deleting the free plugin then clears your settings, your rooms, your wording, which products were switched on, and the artwork chosen for each size. Deleting Gold clears the license key, customers’ saved rooms and their photos.

Delete them in either order. Whichever goes second finishes the job.

Neither plugin hands the license back when it’s deleted. Use Release this site on the License tab for that.

Troubleshooting

Gallery walls, saved rooms or product links aren’t showing. They need Gold, active, with a key activated on the License tab.

A product has no preview link. Gold All three have to be true: Room preview is on, the product has Default artwork, and a page is set under Preview page → Product page link.

A size is red and says it can’t be shown to scale. Its size attribute couldn’t be read. Rename it to something like 16x20, or set the size by hand on the variation.

A shopper’s wall measurement looks wrong. Nearly always the four points aren’t on the wall’s corners, or they measured something that isn’t on the wall. Anything closer to the camera than the wall reads as bigger than it is, and shrinks everything else.

Gold says it needs a newer version of In Situ for WooCommerce. Update the free plugin to the same version as Gold.

Toolbar controls look wrong on my theme. The plugin defends its controls against theme styling, but a theme can always go further. Report it and include the theme name.

Getting help

hello@paperpixelstudio.com

Tell us your WordPress, WooCommerce and PHP versions, your theme, and what you were doing. Tools → Site Health → Info lists the versions.

Scroll to Top