Media management improvements sorely needed...

[ben_allison]

The one gaping hole in WP is proper media management, and getting it up to snuff wouldn't even require anything complicated. I propose a very modest update to this section, that would drastically improve it's functionality.

1) Organization. Add the ability to establish custom hierarchies within the uploads folder (essentially, designate sub-folders, sub-sub-folders, etc). The contents of these subfolders would be accesible via shortcode: (ex, media_folder('holiday') could return a list of links for all items within the subfolder to the loop). Items that appear in the Media popup would simply appear in an accordion list, filtered by folder/subfolder, or possibly a Mac OSX-style column view.

2) Gallery creation. An "insert gallery" tab would be added to the in-post media panel, and a "galleries" item would appear within the Media nav item. Galleries would be created simply by selecting media items from the library, and dragging+dropping to determine order. Of course, galleries would be completely editable, and accessible by the loop via shortcode.

3) Filtering. Add the ability to add/assign tags and categories to media items. Allow alphabetical sorting or filetype sorting.

These basic improvements would really be all that's needed to take WP's media library to a baseline level of functionality.

[scribu]

Everyone agrees that Media Management needs an overhaul.

That said, these "basic improvements" as you call them actually require a lot of code.

So, patches welcome.

[ben_allison]

Ha! I wish I was that good a programmer; if I were it'd be done already. ;)

[Tyrun]

+1 for support of this idea. There needs to be some way to categorize and file images and media.

As soon as you start to scale wordpress into larger sites the media manager is the first to crumble in terms of usability.

[steevithak]

What's the status of development to improve the media library? Is help still need on this? I'm running into this problem frequently on WP sites and would really like to see some improvements made to allow some kind of hierarchical management (e.g. directories, folders, or something like that).

[nacin]

#21390