Ooh, ahh…Wordpress 2.5 has a new gallery feature!  Too bad that doesn’t really help us folks who could care less about it and just want an easy way to upload one image.  IT TAKES TOO MANY STEPS! Maybe it’s just my setup, but this is how it works for me in both Safari and Firefox…

1. Click Add an Image button
2. Upload Image
3. Fill out Title, Caption, Description
4. Click on “None” button for Link URL; realize the button doesn’t work.  Delete the URL from the Link URL input box to manually make it “None”.  Then remember that it won’t get saved anyways!
5. Press “Save All Changes”…or don’t.  It does nothing for you.
6. Go to the Gallery tab.
7. Click “Show” on your picture.
8. Change the Link URL field AGAIN (thank goodness the “None” button works now!)
9. Change Size to “Full size” (I went into Photoshop already to make this image the size I want…please don’t try to change it for me kthanks)
10. Click “Insert into Post”.  Finally.

Are you kidding me?  TEN steps to upload an image and add it to your post?  Why don’t you just give me all the posting options in the upload tab once I’ve uploaded the picture?

So, I’m not good enough to totally rework this disaster of a feature but I can at least change some of the default values so it’s a little less of a pain.  For me, I almost always want the image to link to “none” and the image to be full size.  So I changed these defaults in wp-admin/includes/media.php:

Move the radio button from ‘medium’ to ‘full’

lines 470-472:
" : '' ) . "<input type='radio' name='attachments[$post->ID][image-size]' id='image-size-medium-$post->ID' value='medium' />
<label for='image-size-medium-$post->ID'>" . __('Medium') . "</label>
<input type='radio' name='attachments[$post->ID][image-size]' id='image-size-full-$post->ID' value='full' checked='checked' />

Change the defaults from ‘medium’ to ‘full’ (for good measure)

line 51:
function get_image_send_to_editor($id, $alt, $title, $align, $url='', $rel = false, $size='full') {

line 512:
$size = 'full';

Change the Link URL default value from the file URL to none

line 552:
<input type='text' name='attachments[$post->ID][url]' value='' /><br />

I really wish I didn’t have to go to the Gallery tab at all. Maybe the option to add the image to your post (without going to the Gallery tab) is supposed to work, but it doesn’t. So at least these fixes cut down a couple of those steps for me. Wordpress, please fix this soon!

 

UPDATE: It looks like if I do upload 2+ images at once, the full options (including the “Insert into Post” button) show up right after uploading without having to go into the gallery tab.  I also see the “Crunching…” along with the progress bar, which I don’t usually see with a single upload.  Too bad I usually just want to upload one image.  

Also, my Firefox 3 (beta 5) shuts down whenever I try to use the upload media tool.

 

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 12th, 2008 at 7:46 pm and is filed under software, website. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.