Folder Management?

Thanks for your question. Back in 2010 as I encountered WordPress for the first time I asked our web designer:

2. How should we organize media? It would be good to have a folder for products, a folder for artisans, etc. instead of uploads\2010\08.

I was told in no uncertain terms that this was a bad idea. I followed that advice and have not regretted it. That said, the topic has come up before:

Conflict with JoomlaUnited WP Media Folder

Incompatibility with WP Media Folder

WP Media Folder is one of several plugins that simulate a folder system but don’t change the file locations. Also see:

How to map Image Date to Upload Date

filter and using attachment meta

In summary, there are two aspects to this topic:

1. Uploading media items to “non standard” file directory locations.
2. Showing the “non standard” directory locations in the UI.

The first aspect shouldn’t cause any MLA problems as long as all of the WordPress database fields and values are updated properly. I made some improvements after this topic:

Thumbnails

The second aspect is more risky, since none of the other plugins accommodate MLA’s Media/Assistant submenu screen or its Media Manager popup window additions.

I hope that gives you the information you need. I am marking this topic resolved, but please update it if you have any problems or further questions about non-standard Media Library file locations.

Thanks for the explanation and links provided.

I understand the folders vs. taxonomy dichotomy and agree with most of the points. Unfortunately, for our usage scenario, organizing stuff only by terminology is just part of the equation. Often it has been a need to re-upload one and the same images to improve their quality, focus, etc. Standard WP is completely unsuitable for this out of the box, as the ID’s change on each upload, from this follows broken attached media to pages, including the WC product galleries, and everything that relies upon hard-coded ID’s. We’ve workarounded this with a number of additional plugins (Overwrite Upload, Phoenix Media Rename) and a rather complex custom class I wrote to match filenames to product SKU’s.

Regarding folders, they’d help greatly in keeping different levels of mostly technical low-level concerns clearly apart. For example, a folder of originals and another one for all the generated stuff, and just another one for all website-related artifacts (logos, profile photos, etc.). Flushing the last two can help greatly with lean uploads to servers, archival, and house-keeping of increasingly larger media archives in general. Some (E)CMS go the monolithic db route and offer a number of tools for managing such low-level concerns, so essentially taxonomy could still get things done with “virtual folders” and such. I’m not yet sure what’s the best “future-proof” approach for WP that still works today.

Thanks for your thoughtful comments and application goals. You wrote about “ a need to re-upload one and the same images to improve their quality, focus, etc.” This, too has come up before and you might find the earlier topics helpful:

Image Replacements

This is a complicated collection of topics.