Frustrating Media Library interface

  • Maybe there is a plugin to address the issues I’m about to describe, or some can be addressed in settings that are not apparent to me. Please let me know — but in my opinion, better media file handling needs to be a *default* feature.

    Media Library is only visible one screen at a time, and they may only be selected, not scrolled. This gets very cumbersome when a blog has a large number of media items. When you add a new item, it appears at the top of the list. Then when you reorder by “file” (alphabetically by filename), the item may be several screens away and you have to go through the screens one at a time to find that item. Media Library needs an interface more like Windows Explorer, Mac Finder, or Linux Places, with hierarchical, expandable/collapsible structure and multiple views and sorting options.

    Ordering by date in subfolders isn’t transparent due to lack of a hierarchical interface. In any case, it’s not very useful except when posts and pages are strongly tied to dates.

    WordPress offers three different views of media: “gallery” (media items which are in or once were in the current post or page, even if they have since been removed); Media Library, as already described; “add an image”, which is a stripped-down version of the Media Library *and* does allow opening more than one item at a time, but only if they are on the screen together, and this is a problem because, no matter how you order the images in the Library, they remain in reverse order of date in “add an image”, so you can only compare two images and copy and paste captions etc. between them with both open if they happen to have been added near the same time; this view is also only available when a page is open for editing.

    WordPress loses transparency when crunching GIF images. The transparent color displays as black when the image is shown at any other size except full (original) size.

    All this runs very counter to ease of use!

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  • Thread Starter jsallen

    (@jsallen)

    And here’s another problem: when adding a new image that has the same filename as another, the Media Library does add a number to the end of the filename to keep them distinct — but does not update the thumbnail, so it is sometimes not possible to tell which is which. Square thumbnails that do not show the entire image also are frustrating. How about resizing images so they fit within the thumbnail boundaries?

    Thread Starter jsallen

    (@jsallen)

    And yet another — the one-line caption and alternate text fields when editing media. They’re cumbersome when a longer caption or alternate text is needed — a picture is, as has been said, worth 1000 words and I probably won’t use that many but 10 may not be enough. Adding to the difficulty, I get inconsistent behavior when dragging to select in these fields — sometimes, the caption will scroll using the mouse, sometimes when the selection reaches the edge of the field, it stops even if the caption is longer, and I have to use the keyboard. Is the goal here to enforce a style with snappy little twitter-ish short captions? What if a longer one really is needed?

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