Hide title attribute on hover, but don’t remove

A client of ours uses PrettyPhoto to show galleries of artwork and they recently requested that we change up the way in which the artwork meta information were displayed. This required that the data be moved to the title attribute of the link, which worked surprisingly well. It unfortunately also added an illegible, undesirable, and distracting title when the thumbnails were hovered over for too long.

This title hover is standard browser behavior and there appears to be no way to turn it off. Googling around landed me many ideas on how to simply remove the title:

$(this).removeAttr('title');

This removes the title all together which isn’t what we want. This thread on Stackexchange is very close: http://stackoverflow.com/a/3886050/1655274, removing the title on hover, then adding it back on mouseout. This didn’t work either because the user never actually leaves the image before clicking to view it. Here’s my modified version of that code to replace the title on click:

$(".element").hover(function(){

        // Get the current title
        var title = $(this).attr("title");

        // Store it in a temporary attribute
        $(this).attr("tmp_title", title);

        // Set the title to nothing so we don't see the tooltips
        $(this).attr("title","");
        
    });

  $(".element").click(function(){// Fired when we leave the element

        // Retrieve the title from the temporary attribute
        var title = $(this).attr("tmp_title");

        // Return the title to what it was
        $(this).attr("title", title);
        
    });

There is most certainly a cleaner way to write this, but it works.