Better image management / better integration with WYSIWYG

[Can]

haha don´t know if it´ll be worth publishing it..but we´ll see ;-)

[lisandi]

I really prefer to keep images in their own fields, separate from a textarea/TinyMCE field. It's not about any limitations at all. I've just found this to be the most flexible way of managing this over a long period of time. ProcessWire has always been built to what was ultimately most flexible rather than trying to do the same thing as other CMSs. But I do recognize that it's controversial and may seem unfamiliar if one is already used to a different way. I'm not against alternative patterns for this if it helps appeal to more coming from other CMSs, though not at the expense of the current one which I think is the ideal (at least for my needs). So I always try and keep an open mind about it and am open to supporting more options for those that want them in the future. 

Coming from TYPO3 I agree and disagree.

1. Keeping images separate is very flexible

2. Keeping images in combination with a textareas field would make it much more flexible.

In TYPO3 you have textarea fields and textarea with image fields, than image fields on the other hand. Additionally there is a header (+subheader) field which is added to all of those mentioned fields.

header

textarea

header

textarea

images

header

images

If you delete i.e. textarea part, than you images will still be displayed and vice worse. This is very very handy as on the image as on the image tab you can choose also how to modify or dimension the image.

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But all images get stored in files!!! And this makes it really powerfull as you can upload images in its original size and than the references and additional values get stored with those mentioned fields when you insert an image anywhere in the system. The source will be always the same size.

You can manage the image with a media manager - called "fileadmin" in typo3 - pretty similar to files but with the ability to create real subfolders, upload images via drag and drop into those folder (single or bulk) and all the image meta data is kept at one place. You need to enter only one time i.e. the caption, titletext, link, longtext description i.e. for sight impacted and all those values can be overwritten when you insert into an textarea field.

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The biggest plus of that solution is that you can upload images and other files and let them be managed even by other persons (folderwise)

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The biggest limitation of inserting images on a page is that you have no central point to lookup all those images inserted on pages.

The image manager (@soma) is nice as it is using categories etc but it fails as you might have to do jobs twice, which might create duplicated images.

I hope the gally manager from (@kongondo) will solve that problem but as I could not test it until now it might be also only a solution like Yag Gallery in TYPO3 which is a great image manager and it uses a page (storagefolder type) to store all data in it but even it has nice additional features you have a duplicated image in the Yag subfolders (in real folders under fileadmin)

Where does all those images which get inserted on a page get stored?

IMHO it would help if the files manager under "files" would have additional possibilities i.e. sorting by category, or by tags, or meta text, or image size, or even color values. etc.

In all those cases all images still could be stored under files in a "wild long long list, which will be quite difficult to maintain, guess you have about 50.000 Images you want to manage. This number is not high for a publishing company (National Geographics - whichis now using django-cms) or ngo organisation i.e. UNESCO (which are using TYPO3 especially because of the integrated digital asset management and file abstraction layers to integrate images also from external resources like dropbox or flickr or picasa etc. which is even a much better (outsourced) solution to maintain images properly) etc.

IMHO nearly all CMS store their digital assets like processwire is doing it in a long long list, which is simply unusable if you have more than 50 files to be displayed in a "Flickr" way more or less (they have a similar problem - Picasa is a great sorted solution on the opposite). Beside TYPO3 I don't know any other who does digital asset management properly. Odoo, a great website builder - really intuitive - makes customers happy with the very easy to handle creation of nice looking htm5 responsive websites, but as soon as those customers have more than 50 images they get frustrated as also Odoo is managing dogital asset only in a long long list and you have to scroll, scroll, scroll until you find something which is total crab. Drupal Wordpress play in the same unmanagable digital asset league.

I read in another Thread about making Processwire and Enterprise CMS - well without Proper Digital Asset Management it won't get there as having this done properly will make Processwire a number one solution for Publishers, NGOs and bigger Enterprise customers at all.

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One solution I could think about would be extending the file manager with a great search functionality and sorting functionality so you can find assets fast and of course there shoudl be the possibility to sort between images and js files and pdf documents etc. Right now it looks like a perfect chaos.

Storing images on a page - OK, but please provide a way to gather all those images stored on all kind of pages on a Summary page so you don't have to search endlessly for them and probably insert the image again and again as you can't find the one you know you have inserted a couple times already ;-) Think about an NGO site like UNESCO Bangkok with over 5000 pages or publishing companies with 10.000s of pages and images inserted on those pages.

[Soma]

I'm using the page=image as with ImagesManager in some big project where there is or will be 100'000+ of images to manage. I have then built a fieltype I can select and insert them to a page from all those via filtering/search (ajax). We never insert image into a textarea via TinyMCE or CKeditor image dialog because it's cumbersome to use and manage, we rather use hanna code to have them inserted in a more controlled way (if at all), but often the better option is to use PageTable or repeaters to create block with text and image. This system is ultimatively flexible and PW provides all the foundation to use it how you want and need (unlike any other CMS media system). It's just a matter of creating some simple modules that may help you in that regard. PW is still in it's beginning and will certainly grow in that regard with modules that help with asset management. I just don't have the time to spend on that to share with the community. But time will tell.

[mr-fan]

Yes a big big "Thank you" to Soma for his approach!!

I used this too and setup a admin page with the imagetree itself to manage them easy.

Imagemanager was not really that what i want - but the structure is great.

First pic shows a own AdminCustomPage with diogo's module and second pic shows a little jquery mod where i set the &modal=1 to the edit links on this adminpages....works great 20 lines code.

Users can choose a image from the insert image dialog in the Editor or i build up little gallerys with an pagefield!

PW is great with images, too - you can have the structure you need.

All pic related to the content like productimages (makes sense) or for sites that using less images from one central managed folder/image structure to choose it is easy possible, too.

Again thanks to soma for this - i'm using your files as pages approach, too!! ALL ARE PAGES ;)