[mszmszmsz]

The biggest mess IMO is the media library. Unsustainable, chaotic, impossible to keep in order if you happen to publish more than just a few images.

It’s not a library. It’s a file dump. If you want to reuse an asset on a non-trivial site, it’s easier to reupload the file rather than to find it in a flat list of thousands of thumbnails.

Folders, please.

And the four hopeless fields to provide an image with textual metadata (alt, caption etc). It’s impossible to understand intuitively. So anti-human, lacking understanding of what users need and are capable of grasping.

Reveal the complexity gradually, please.

Same goes for the myriads of options (special love goes to the media link/image size selector with its thoughtless defaults you have to scroll down the media library modal to even reveal itself) just to insert an image into the text.

Just to name a few problems.

[pathartl]

Folders are something that's been needed in WordPress for 10+ years and hasn't gained any traction. It's to the point where it's beyond terrible and is a large reason I don't use WP anymore.

[snowwrestler]

Folders have problems too, inflexible and depend on people managing them well. If the team can’t be bothered to namespace files and fill in metadata properly, I doubt they will manage folders well either.

It’s 2022. There’s got to be something more sophisticated than folders, something content-aware that reliably finds the desired image in the library and suggests it when someone tries to upload a dupe. How do we have computer vision reliable enough to recognize people on our phones and steer a car, but we’re still relying on metadata and folders to find images in a web CMS?

But the truth is, storage is cheap so there is no compelling reason to solve this problem. If the site ends up with 27 copies of the same JPG, who cares? Oh no, we used 30MB we didn’t have to.

[wink]

That does not make sense to me at all. As a single user, where is the relation between "namespace files" and "metadata" when all I want is to upload some images to a folder named foo or 2022?

I'm not saying there isn't a better solution, but other blog/cms applications could do folders without problems 15 years ago.

[weird-eye-issue]

We have over 8000 images and growing. If you name them properly and use alt text the searching works okay. But we also don't reuse images that much (not because they are hard to find)