Where's the Gallery Tab in the new Media Library?

  • For the most part, I’m very happy with the changes to the Media Library. Apparently, however, someone made a design decision that no one uses the Gallery tab that used to be in the old version. Unless I’m missing something, when I click either Add Media or Set Featured Image, the Gallery tab that showed all the existing attachments for that particular post is no longer available. That was very handy for use on sites where people use multiple photos in their posts and have a lot of posts. I have several clients who fit that description.

    One of my clients decided recently to use the Featured Image so I have to go through each post and set the featured image to one of the images in the post. Because there are a lot of posts and consequently a lot of images, it’s a real PITA to have to search for each post’s images to find it/them and set the featured image.

    If I’m missing it, please point me to where it was moved. If it’s gone, please bring it back.

    Thanks,

    John

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

  • Have you had a look at the Create Gallery option?

    Thread Starter sawyerjw

    (@sawyerjw)

    I don’t want to create a gallery. I want to see the attachments for an existing post which would constitute an existing gallery, would it not?

    As I understand it, any gallery created prior to WP 3.5 will no longer be identified as a gallery in the back end of WordPress – although any pre-existing gallery shortcodes will still be honoured on the front end of the site. This is because the editorial flow involved in gallery creation was changed in 3.5. It’s no longer sufficient to merely have media attached to a Post or Page. You have actually create a gallery object. I’d imagine that this decision was taken to try and improve gallery flexibility and to allow people to upload/attach an image to a page without that image being displayed in the gallery. Previously, a lot of people did seem to have problems wrangling this kind of “attachment -> gallery” situation.

    An unfortunate by-product of this was the loss (in the back end) of the gallery functionality for pre-existing galleries. The only way around this (that I know of) is to remove the old gallery from the page and re-create a fresh one. ??

    Thread Starter sawyerjw

    (@sawyerjw)

    Okay, I understand that design changes often lead to unpleasant consequences for somebody. This particular design decision is going to end up costing people a good deal of time and/or money in scenarios such as I described.

    On the other hand, this sounds like an opportunity for a plugin developer. ??

    Thanks for the insights.

    FWIW: In version 3.5.1, inside the media upload overlay, you click “Media Library,” a small pull-down menu will appear. You can switch that from “All media items” (which shows the latest uploads) to “Uploaded to this post” (which shows the old-style list of images that were originally uploaded with that particular post).

    Thread Starter sawyerjw

    (@sawyerjw)

    It occurs to me that I missed a subtlety in this whole discussion. Granting that what is now called a “gallery” is an object as opposed to what it was in previous incarnations, what is the possibility of simply having an additional tab that shows the attachments for the currently selected post/page? Or perhaps a predefined search query that returns the same? It doesn’t have to be called a Gallery, but there is a real need for this.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
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