Image editor UX could be more straightforward

[simonwheatley]

The image editor introduced in v2.9 (?) is pretty handy, but I believe the UI needs to be straightforward. Here's some issues which I see, as a starter for discussion, and hopefully later I'll be able to make some quick wireframes to suggest improvements and so everyone can have something to get hating.

The overarching issue is that the UI seems confused when it comes to committing the action you've just taken, for example:

• To scale an image, you commit the action with a button labelled "Scale".
• To commit a crop you have to click the crop icon button, which looks like a tool selection button (ala Photoshop) rather than something which commits the change.
• The Save button is disabled most of the time, for reasons which are unclear, but it's not super obviously styled as disabled.

Separately from the problems of committing actions, the "Apply changes to" panel is kind of stuck down to the right and it's not clear at which points it's having an effect.

There are no messages back to the user to confirm whether actions have or haven't been taken.

[JohnONolan]

Hi Simon,
Could I encourage you to come to UI group meetings on Tuesdays for this sort of stuff? Generally we handle the UI/UX ideas and projects over at ​http://make.wordpress.org/ui first, and then once they're signed off we come over to Trac for Teh Code!

[jane]

The media uploader redesign we had planed included fixing up the image editing. As Andrew Ozz was coding up the UI, it became clear that the media code was super-convoluted and touched almost every piece of WP, and backwards compatibility was going to be a bear. Mike Adams suggested maybe we should put the UI on hold and plan to attack the media code altogether in a future release. Now that 3.0 is out of the way, we can talk about when we can do the media stuff, but 3.1 is going to be the "wordpress.org release," so media will likely need to wait for 3.2.

[webvitaly]

Feature request: why loading animation during all actions is showing always above the crop tool? I think, it would be more intuitive, if the animation will appear above specific button of the current action or above the working image.
I am using WordPress 3.3-aortic-desection.

[simonwheatley]

This looks fixed to me now.

[markoheijnen]

Currently I'm working on a complete redesign for the image editor. That is something what is still needed in my opinion. I guess with the new media dialog in 3.5 even more. I'm now learning backbone to make the image editing as a dialog and play with that. Will be releasing that as a plugin. What hopefully I can release before 3.6

[ericlewis]

Related: #11477

[ericlewis]

Replying to markoheijnen:

Currently I'm working on a complete redesign for the image editor.

Did you make any headway in this regard?

[markoheijnen]

No, After the changes in 3.9 I didn't had the time to look at those and build on that. I would love to work on this ticket but would like to see a team around this. I will start joining the Media Component Office Hours on Friday.