module Image Library — edit every image across your whole site in one table

[Mikel]

Hi all — we're putting this one up as a public beta and looking for feedback before we tag a stable release.

How it started. Over the past months we've been moving an old blog into a fresh PW site using our own SiteSync module and a Claude Code agent doing most of the migration grunt work. At some point the blog owner mentioned, in that very offhand way clients do, "hey, an image search would be nice." It was Saturday afternoon, so we let the agent build a prototype, pushed it through SiteSync, tested it on the phone an hour later. Worked great. Search results were… not great. But the search wasn't the problem – the underlying data was. Thousands of imported images, almost no descriptions, no tags, no nothing.

So we needed a way to retroactively caption and tag a few thousand images without clicking through hundreds of page edits one by one. Since PW (rightly) attaches images to the pages they belong to, we needed a tool that reaches across the whole install at once and – crucially – can edit metadata in bulk.

Why not the existing modules? We looked at the two obvious candidates:

• Media Manager by @kongondo – great if you're starting fresh and want a central media hub. But it's its own  storage layer: you upload INTO Media Manager, editors pick FROM Media Manager. Images already sitting on per-page image fields stay invisible to it. Also commercial.
• MediaLibrary by @BitPoet – adds a MediaLibrary template with its own MediaImages / MediaFiles fields plus a CKEditor picker. Same pattern: a separate page hierarchy you migrate media into.

Both are well-designed for "we want a central media model from day one." Neither helps you when the media is already scattered across lead_image, body_images, gallery,  images_in_some_repeater etc. Migrating that into a different storage layer would have broken the original page model the blog depends on.

So we built Image Library: a Process module that does nothing to your data – it just surfaces a cross-site table view of everything that's already there, with serious bulk editing on top.

The bulk-edit part – the reason this module exists.

Selection as a paintbrush. You tick N rows across any pages, templates and image fields. Then you edit a cell on ANY of those rows — the popup gains an Add / Replace mode picker (tags additionally offer Remove) and the value gets broadcast to the entire selection in one server round.

• Same row applies to description, tags, every custom subfield, AND the filename (with placeholders: (n), (n2)..(n5) padded counters, (N) total, (t) page title, (d) date, (p) page name, (f) field name → e.g. rename 200 selected files to event-2025-(n3).jpg).
• Same row applies to delete (one trash click, whole selection gone behind one confirm dialog with a where-used preflight – see below).
• Edits that push a row OUT of the active filter ("missing tags" → tag assigned → row no longer matches) fade out and drop from the table; counters auto-decrement.

Other highlights:

• One sortable, paginated, bookmarkable table across every FieldtypeImage field on every page on every template (with config-side blacklists).
• Inline edit per cell – multilang-aware: language tabs in the popup, all languages committed in one save.
• Typed widgets per custom subfield: checkbox, date, integer, options (single + multi), and FieldtypePage rendered through PW's actually configured Inputfield (PageAutocomplete / PageListSelect / ASMSelect / whatever the field uses) — no re-implementation.
• Replace image in place (drag-drop or upload icon) – basename stays, variations regen.
• Delete with where-used preflight: dialog scans every Textarea via $pages->findIDs("field%='/pid/stem.', include=all") and lists the pages where the image is still embedded in rich text – CKEditor + TinyMCE both, multilang-aware, with direct edit links so you can fix embeds before deleting.
• JSON / CSV export + import for offline metadata work – hand a CSV to a copywriter or feed it to your agent, get it back, import it.
• View prefs (columns, page size, bookmarks) live in $user->meta, cross-device.

Status. v0.51.x – public beta. Module + docs (EN + DE concept) at GitHub

Feedback welcome – especially edge cases we haven't seen yet (weird Fieldtype combos in custom-field templates, ProFields, Repeaters / RepeaterMatrix nesting). And if you've got a use case the current feature set doesn't cover, let us know.

Cheers, Mike