EP466 – The Media Library ends its silence

[00:00:00] Sé Reed: 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0,

[00:00:09] poof!

[00:00:09] Jason Tucker: This is episode number 466 of WPwatercooler, The Media Library Ends Its Silence.

[00:00:17] Sé Reed: was silent. The media library

[00:00:20] Jason Tucker: Tucker. You can find me over at jasontucker. blog. Go

[00:00:26] Sé Reed: Hey, I’m Sé Reed and I make things around the internet. Sé Reed Media on all the things! What?

[00:00:34] Jason Cosper: And y’all know who it is, it’s your boy, Jason Cosper. I am the lizard king

[00:00:41] Sé Reed: Hola, Sergei!

[00:00:42] Jason Tucker: find us wherever it is that you find awesome podcasts, because we are one of those. And you can come hang out with us in our Discord.

[00:00:49] Sé Reed: My guess is that you’ve already found us, if you’re here.

[00:00:52] Jason Tucker: Yeah!

[00:00:53] Sé Reed: I’ve always thought that was weird. It’s like, why are we telling people to subscribe if they’re already here watching it?

[00:01:00] Jason Cosper: For the people who might be getting us in suggested videos.

[00:01:07] Sé Reed: Oh, yeah. Algorithms. That’s right. And shooters. Yeah. Al Gore’s Rhythm. If you walk without Al Gore’s Rhythm, you won’t attract the worm.

[00:01:18] Okay, that is hilarious, and we need to get into that at some point. We have a guest today, though, so we won’t get into it today. Our guest today has been on the show before, but not in a very long time. Which

[00:01:31] William Bay: 11 years ago.

[00:01:33] Jason Tucker: right?

[00:01:34] Sé Reed: once upon a time. No, I think it was 10 years ago, because we’re 11 years old, and you were on the

[00:01:38] William Bay: In a

[00:01:40] Sé Reed: a world before Gutenberg. In a world.

[00:01:45] William Bay: before

[00:01:45] Sé Reed: Also the block editor there was the media library and now there still is the media library because no one’s done anything with it

[00:01:57] William Bay: 11 years

[00:01:58] Jason Tucker: yeah. No one has done anything with it at all.

[00:02:01] Sé Reed: I think the media library, I’ll get to you in a second, introducing you, but I do think that the media library has not been touched.

[00:02:09] Has not been… Programmically touched, I should specify. It’s lonely and silent. That’s all I’m saying. It’s lonely. It needs some love. Alright, so anyway, speaking of that, here is William. William is here. Not only is he a long time WordPress dude from San Diego, he’s been an organizer of WordPress, WordCamp, those campy things.

[00:02:37] Organizer, right?

[00:02:40] William Bay: advisor

[00:02:41] Sé Reed: I know you were

[00:02:42] William Bay: For the failed 2020 Word Camp San Diego.

[00:02:46] Sé Reed: well, for something, yeah, 2020, nothing happened that year. Exactly. It was failed.

[00:02:51] Not only, and you can introduce yourself in a minute, but I do want to say one of the reasons we’re having William on is not just because he wrote a. Creed, a screed, a cry out to attention

[00:03:06] William Bay: It was a cry for attention.

[00:03:08] Sé Reed: was a cry, retention, a plea for help and sanity in WordPress. But when we had William on 10 years ago, we were talking about the media library.

[00:03:20] Jason Tucker: The same version of the media library,

[00:03:22] William Bay: That’s

[00:03:22] Sé Reed: Library

[00:03:22] Jason Tucker: We diffed it and nothing changed.

[00:03:25] Sé Reed: and I thought we all thought it would be so apt to bring you back on again to talk about that now that there might be.

[00:03:34] Jason Cosper: I’m

[00:03:36] William Bay: something there there’s a movement going on.

[00:03:39] Sé Reed: tell us about yourself, William, or why you’re here, or how that wood life is going.

[00:03:45] William Bay: Yeah. So I am a WordPress developer and I am, and I do take care of clients occasionally, but I have been a professional photographer in the past, and I’ve been, I grew up photographing, I’ve been photographing since I was about eight years old and yeah, my, my

[00:04:06] Sé Reed: People don’t say that a lot.

[00:04:08] William Bay: what’s that?

[00:04:09] Sé Reed: People just, people say, I’m photographing. Is that like

[00:04:12] William Bay: I have been photographing.

[00:04:14] Sé Reed: I photograph.

[00:04:15] William Bay: my, what was my,

[00:04:17] Jason Tucker: So you,

[00:04:17] Sé Reed: Anyway,

[00:04:18] William Bay: I adjective really do something inappropriate grammar. Grammarly. Yeah. Yeah. A bunch of EPS files and then what occurred?

[00:04:29] E PS

[00:04:31] Jason Tucker: I don’t think of a really old file format.

[00:04:33] Sé Reed: That’s all it is.

[00:04:33] William Bay: I export from raw, I export raw from live, from Lightroom to e p s. Yes. All my photos go to S V G. Yeah. Now, so I’m I’ve been a developer. My clientele over the years have been primarily photographers. So I’ve been in the space and know how to use

[00:04:54] Sé Reed: Photographers.

[00:04:55] William Bay: the way, I have I do have a media library with me today.

[00:05:00] Sé Reed: Hey, that looks just like our media library in WordPress.

[00:05:03] Jason Cosper: I saw the flaming lips in there That was a stack of CDs. Those are known as

[00:05:09] William Bay: a, yeah,

[00:05:10] Sé Reed: discs for those of you who need to Google.

[00:05:13] William Bay: grid view list view, yeah,

[00:05:17] Jason Tucker: Very

[00:05:18] Sé Reed: That was a visual joke for all of you listening. But you should watch the show for that. I don’t know

[00:05:23] William Bay: Yeah I am like a real developer. I was I do, I am happily unemployed right now. There was a. So I worked for a bit and then before that I was with another agency for a while and yeah, so I’d make websites and high end custom websites.

[00:05:44] Jason Cosper: Better better to be happily unemployed than unhappily employed.

[00:05:51] William Bay: Yeah. I was very happy. By the way, I was very happy at WebDevStudios.

[00:05:58] Jason Cosper: Sure.

[00:05:59] William Bay: unfortunate that a bunch of us had to get go, had to let go, be let go. But yeah,

[00:06:04] Sé Reed: it’s the economy.

[00:06:05] Jason Tucker: So this gives you some time to sit here and think about what’s up with the media library and why hasn’t it changed over the years. And we we’re, we were all sitting there seeing this idea that there’s this this refresh of the media library. There’s an interest of it.

[00:06:22] That’s coming up here and we’re all looking at it going this isn’t enough.

[00:06:28] Sé Reed: Okay,

[00:06:29] William Bay: right I know you’re proposing this stuff, but I don’t feel like this is enough.

[00:06:35] Sé Reed: we get there, though, I want to back up a second, because the reason we know that the Media Library is part of Phase 3, which we are embarking Phase 3 is because it’s written in the roadmap, right? It’s in there that to remodel, redo the media library, it needs an upgrade. So it has not been upgraded.

[00:06:57] And maybe there have been some small programmatic changes to keep it act functional and all that. I’m not aware of those specifically,

[00:07:04] William Bay: Oh yeah, absolutely, yeah.

[00:07:06] Sé Reed: Yeah, there have been no effective functionality changes.

[00:07:11] William Bay: So behind the scenes, there’s a lot going on that have been improved over the last 10, 12 years ago we got back then we had just had when I was on the show last of nine or 10 years ago, it was, we had just released responsive images, right?

[00:07:28] So the image source set had just been released. Yeah there were some bugs with that, that it stopped at the 1024 size, right? And then if your images were larger than that, it would show those. If you’re on a really large screen, and you have a 3 pixel image.

[00:07:47] It would show that because it was, the limits were 1024, right? So there’s some bugs that have been fixed at I was complaining about that for two years. They finally, those finally got changed, right? So now we have the original stays as the original that doesn’t get added to the source set.

[00:08:06] And I think the largest it’ll go up to now is 2048, so we’re capped with that image source set, like the sources that are in that. And so that was one of the big changes, but then there’s you look through if you go to the core media slack group Anthony and those guys are, like, hitting all the bugs that have been coming up there’s so much going

[00:08:32] Sé Reed: poor channels in Make Slack. I cannot even.

[00:08:35] William Bay: So

[00:08:36] Sé Reed: track them all.

[00:08:38] William Bay: You’re talking about like work going on, there’s so much to keep,

[00:08:41] Jason Cosper: we’re

[00:08:43] William Bay: what we have currently. And yeah but then there’s this whole yeah we totally need a new media library as well. And the proposal, Matthias proposal that we were talking about is like addressing some of that.

[00:09:00] But yeah like to

[00:09:01] Sé Reed: The TS Ventura Gutenberg,

[00:09:05] William Bay: Yeah, Matthias,

[00:09:06] Sé Reed: right? That’s what you’re talking about?

[00:09:08] William Bay: yeah.

[00:09:08] Sé Reed: Yeah. Full on Dan or go home. So

[00:09:12] William Bay: No I’m with Rachel for

[00:09:14] Sé Reed: I want to back up a little bit before we start talking about features. Because I’m obsessed with process. And can we address what DAM means, like really quick, so people aren’t lost?

[00:09:24] in a minute…

[00:09:25] Jason Tucker: go for it,

[00:09:25] Jason Cosper: see

[00:09:27] William Bay: DAM is a digital asset management or manager, right? And that’s where a lot of us, where it wants the media library to go.

[00:09:34] Sé Reed: Yeah, because it turns out PDFs, not so great in the media library. okay. But I want to back this up because before we talk about features, and I promise I won’t dwell on this forever, I want to say for example, you’ve been talking about where is the media library conversation happening, right?

[00:09:52] You are in core media, which is in the Slack channel, and the conversation’s not happening there. We, we went on after last week’s show and our discussion about you, we, we mentioned on last week’s show that you did not get a reply back when you’re asking Matthias the developer for Gutenberg in phase three what.

[00:10:16] Where that conversation was being held. And, lo and behold, after the show, you got a ping back that told you and gave you a link to the GitHub repo where this is happening, right?

[00:10:30] Jason Cosper: Thank

[00:10:31] William Bay: repo where something was happening. Just a full…

[00:10:34] Jason Cosper: for

[00:10:36] Sé Reed: it to the show notes here?

[00:10:38] Jason Cosper: us

[00:10:40] William Bay: yeah I’ll

[00:10:41] Jason Tucker: we, it’s in the show notes currently, so we’re good.

[00:10:44] William Bay: Oh, great. Okay, cool. But it was a proposal, not it wasn’t like some de facto location where everyone was talking about this. Now, since then I’ve made some suggestions and said, hey, can we get can we have one cohesive place to discuss this?

[00:11:06] Is this going to be like discussed on the… Core media Slack channel or is there one place where we can bring all the the feature requests that people have been talking about in

[00:11:19] Sé Reed: That would be so easy, William. Why wouldn’t we, we can’t do that, because then we can’t have fractured communication and plausible deniability. I don’t know what

[00:11:28] William Bay: It’s impossible.

[00:11:29] Sé Reed: like, rational, one place to have a conversation, that people can provide feedback. You are living in a dreamland.

[00:11:38] Jason Tucker: Thank you.

[00:11:40] Sé Reed: Sorry, I’m a little bitter right now. I don’t know if you can hear that or not. It’s just there’s a slight bitter tone. It might be the coffee, but I’m going to try to tone it down. I promise. Just a

[00:11:51] William Bay: add a little sugar.

[00:11:51] Sé Reed: It’s been a rough time for me,

[00:11:53] Jason Tucker: so we’ve seen a lot

[00:11:55] William Bay: sugar.

[00:11:56] Jason Tucker: we’ve seen a lot of ways in which that people have tried to build out either like some type of AJAX interface thing, some kind of overlay that happens on the media library. You go do a search in, in for media library replacement or any of those sorts of things in in the plugins.

[00:12:14] And you’ll find that a lot of people have come up with these really like crazy ways of setting stuff up. But none of them are what we’re asking for, which is having we don’t need like an entire copy of Lightroom inside of this interface, but we definitely want to be able to figure out where the heck the images are being used, how to categorize them a certain way.

[00:12:36] And for me, I think for me, the the classification of the image is important for me, like what it was, what was the intention of uploading this particular image or what was the reason why we upload this PDF What’s this audio file?

[00:12:53] Sé Reed: Jason, I don’t understand why you are not happy with the attached component, because that tells you where it was uploaded, and that is really all you will ever need to know. You need to just, was it uploaded in a post, or was it uploaded directly to the library? That is key information, and it

[00:13:08] Jason Tucker: I saw a coworker go into the media library, find the URL for the, for that media, that piece of media, grab that URL, go over to the website, hit the image, and then pasted in the full URL for

[00:13:23] William Bay: it in.

[00:13:24] Sé Reed: Oh no.

[00:13:24] Jason Tucker: And I was like

[00:13:25] William Bay: Did he did he type in img source equals, did he actually do all that?

[00:13:33] Sé Reed: I should point out how many of the exact same stock photo are in some of my client sites, especially the ones that are heavy on calendar usage, because the business turns out there’s not a ton of great ways to illustrate business conversations and meetings. Weird. And at workshops.

[00:13:54] So it’s literally So many copies of the same unsplash photo. It just, I

[00:14:01] William Bay: It’s the guy, it’s the guy sitting in the booth with the laptop with the

[00:14:04] Sé Reed: but I can’t go in and delete them because I don’t know where they’re being used. So I

[00:14:09] Jason Cosper: Let’s

[00:14:10] Sé Reed: I don’t even I haven’t even put the thought process in to figure out what I would need to do to go have them all use the same image, because that is just seems like this morass of pain. Am I in the database searching for underscore one or

[00:14:27] Jason Tucker: I have done that.

[00:14:28] Sé Reed: Right.

[00:14:28] Oh, good God. Wow. So you can have, can you I can just imagine someone who’s not like thinking about it that way and they’re like, oh, there’s all these duplicates. Hold on. I’ll just delete this.

[00:14:42] William Bay: Yeah, so I’m one of the things obviously is it, improving the filterability. But I think we should consider having some way to manage duplicates, right? Duplicate. And, yeah, the, there is…

[00:14:59] Sé Reed: Would you like to use the photo that already exists instead of auto naming it under 4.

[00:15:04] William Bay: Cool.

[00:15:05] Sé Reed: This

[00:15:06] Jason Cosper: This matches an MD5 hash of an image that you’ve uploaded before.

[00:15:12] Sé Reed: don’t even need like the AI to be like, this looks like this other picture. It can literally do this file name. You already have it.

[00:15:20] Jason Cosper: Yeah. No, and

[00:15:22] Sé Reed: looking because it does the underscore one, underscore two forever, right? So it already knows.

[00:15:27] Jason Cosper: if it is the exact. If it is the exact same picture, it should match like an MD5 hash. So there are ways to do this already where it’s just basically Oh, you upload the photo. If it matches anything that is already in the database.

[00:15:45] Sé Reed: just use that photo.

[00:15:47] You don’t upload it. You like check prior, like the computer, the software checks prior to the upload, if that already exists. And if it already exists, it uses the already existing one.

[00:15:58] Jason Cosper: sure or you upload it and if it matches something that’s already uploaded, it goes, Hey, I would like to throw this away and you can use, like you just wasted your bandwidth. Thank you. However.

[00:16:13] Sé Reed: I just want to say also in the chat Mika said that someone literally did that, I’m assuming, deleting the duplicates, and they had to back it up, they had to redo it because

[00:16:22] Jason Tucker: Oh yeah.

[00:16:23] Sé Reed: their messages, all their images. It is it is not just disorganized, that’s the thing.

[00:16:30] This is not just, oh, this isn’t like a Google Drive that has everything not in folders, right? Because it, it is literally… It’s built to make it harder to find the thing. It’s not built in order to make it harder. But the way that it is

[00:16:47] William Bay: That was just never, it was never a consideration.

[00:16:50] Sé Reed: And also, it just hasn’t been touched in ten years.

[00:16:52] And it turns out, people use images have changed. There’s a lot of different image file formats. There’s all sorts of stuff. I don’t want to get down on the fact that we haven’t touched it, although this has obviously been a very important thing for me for a long time. I’ve been on this what’s with the media library train for ages.

[00:17:12] But what I’m really concerned about is that now that we are looking at it, that it has not been something that we are asking the community about. And I know this is a thing that I’m about talking to the community or whatever. A pattern that’s occurring here.

[00:17:30] yeah we don’t do that or something here.

[00:17:33] But there are, like, I just, the brain trust the amount of experience and intelligence and knowledge that is available within the WordPress community is really unparalleled. And the amount of time, like… Everyone who uses a WordPress site uses the media library. It’s not like a plugin that you’re whatever, like we all use it.

[00:18:00] You have to use it. It is if you have any images on your site, you use it. Like the WPCC’s website has like no, like one image. Guess what? Yeah. The logo is not even in there. Because it’s a full site. It’s one of the, whatever, the fancy new ones. And so that’s in the template.

[00:18:20] It’s, I don’t even

[00:18:21] Jason Tucker: luckily there’s 15 copies of that logo. There’s 15 copies of that logo that has been made in order to make sure that it will show up on all the various sizes that you’ve ever done and all the themes that you’ve installed, that image has been like rebuilt in order to be able to do it like, I don’t know, there, there’s a lot to the media library or media management that, that isn’t just.

[00:18:43] Let’s put some tags and let’s put some some categories together. Cause I’ve done that and we I’ve

[00:18:50] Sé Reed: shows up in

[00:18:51] Jason Tucker: Staff at work, Hey, look, here’s the deal. I need you to, I need to know every time this hero image or, and hero image is being uploaded, you need to name your files with the word hero at the beginning of it, just so we can find all of these images.

[00:19:04] Like we’ve had to come up with some like clever stuff in order to be able to manage stuff in a very basic. MediaLibrary. Like this thing is just too basic for its own good.

[00:19:18] William Bay: and the thing that, that really comes down to, it’s not just for photographers, it’s not just for like for normal people, but what the feature set that we’re really requesting here is you have.

[00:19:32] Sé Reed: template. it’s

[00:19:33] William Bay: Actual publish. You have actual publishers.

[00:19:36] You have actual publishers that use WordPress. And so if you think about it, like how does like a reporter who was working on a project, say they’re working on a project that they come back to more than once. They’re recurring project that they’re a journalist on Right?

[00:19:55] And they have to like, They have to come back and find a photo that they used on an article they wrote maybe six months ago to get that one photo that their staff photographer took and republish it, right? So this is the kind of this is real world stuff that people need.

[00:20:17] Or they’re just going to re upload that photo again when they say, Hey, can you send me that one photo, blah, blah, blah, right? Then it gets into things like rights management like copyright, usage rights like that, that, that photographer that we’re reusing that, that photo either gets a byline or a copyright, right?

[00:20:35] Like, how is that going to be handled? So this is actually not just like regular

[00:20:42] Sé Reed: and your dreams.

[00:20:42] William Bay: use WordPress, but this is what is that next level that. WordPress needs to provide to publishers so that it’s actual, a usable thing, right?

[00:20:53] Sé Reed: I don’t know, though, that public so I agree with you, okay, completely. However, in terms of framing the case, I do not think that framing the case in terms of publishers is a great approach. Not because they don’t have those needs, but because of WordPress VIP and Newspack and the Desire the appearance that a lot of publishers, many publishers use that service.

[00:21:26] And that’s that’s a bespoke service. And that all that stuff over there if that’s the only use case, then we’re talking about a use case that the project leadership feels that they know inside and out. So I think that it is important to use other. Use cases that are not related specifically to news publishing, because

[00:21:52] William Bay: but they’re not all, they’re not all on they’re not all

[00:21:55] Sé Reed: know they’re not all on it, but that doesn’t

[00:21:57] William Bay: I worked on two in the last, I worked on two magazines in the last year and a half that are like on WP Engine, yeah, no, I’m not saying they’re all on there. I do not, they’re not all on there, and I think it’s a completely valid use case. However, when the people who are creating what we’re talking about are being informed of use cases, if we inform them of a use case that they are already, have already in their minds, think that they have all of that information, and all of that knowledge, and they’re like, oh, I know about that.

[00:22:27] Sé Reed: They’re not going to listen. That is my point. So I think if we can when you’re at, when you’re having those conversations. And get ready, because guess who’s going to join CoreMedia? I think that it’s important to use cases that are not already asked and answered, right? Something that they think that they already have on lockdown, because they’re just going to say, we already know, you don’t know what you’re talking about, and really not listen to what you say.

[00:22:56] That’s just, that is, see, this is nothing to do with the needs of publishers, or publishers that are not on It’s not about VIP or using the, those tools, it is just about the people who are making the, these changes and trying to explain use cases in a way that will be heard. Not that I’m great at being heard in this project.

[00:23:20] But I’m getting better at it, I don’t

[00:23:24] Jason Tucker: I think there’s

[00:23:26] William Bay: Hey, listen I’m going to be one of those people. I’m going to be one of those people rolling up my sleeves and actually in, in the code like I, yeah I’ve already got see before, before I started diving into this is last couple of years I was thinking about doing something as a a commercial product.

[00:23:45] That replaces the media library with the ability to extend out to clients and projects where you can actually you know, and have a catalog where you can define prices for things and that, that sort of thing. So it’d be a commercial product for my photographers. But the more and more I think about it a lot of this can be done without it being a commercial product and take out those unique features that I would want and just improve the media library, right?

[00:24:15] And just in general yeah, and I want to also say you put into that particular, and can we link, please, the Slack, or not the Slack, the GitHub thread, where you’re responding, because that is, that proof of concept whatever that is currently where that conversation is being held, no matter where it is going to go.

[00:24:35] Sé Reed: So we’ll put that in the show notes. But you, on your comments, actually put mock ups that you had done. A ways back, not current mockups. So I thought that was interesting because it felt like you weren’t just I was really glad that you put those in there because it felt like you weren’t just saying, Oh, I don’t like your idea.

[00:24:53] You were providing additional stuff and you’re like, No, really, I’ve been thinking about it. This isn’t just… You’re not… Because I feel like a lot of the times… Even if you have great points, if you’re just providing text, it feels like you’re just armchair commenting. But I feel like your mock ups provided another perspective and also showed that it wasn’t just about critiquing their proof of concept, but

[00:25:21] William Bay: Oh, sure. Yeah.

[00:25:22] Sé Reed: I thought that was really valuable and a very good place to start because… Why wouldn’t we have multiple mock ups to look at? We should have multiple mock ups that we’re looking at and being like, Ooh, we could pull from some of these. We have, and this is something that’s happened across the project in the current redesign that’s happening.

[00:25:41] We get one mock up and then some people can add some comments and then it tweaks things a little bit. But the multiple mock up situation where we’re bringing in new, multiple new perspectives. That’s not happening. I think if we could even spin up more mock ups, not just using words for this the media library is obviously very visual, so it’s important, but I really think that shows, especially since these folks are really design based I think it really shows other ways.

[00:26:13] So if other folks have ideas about how the media library could look, just mock it up. Seriously. Screenshot that, write some stuff on there demonstrate what you would do, as William has done, other than just critiquing what is there. Because I think that is, that way we can maybe, escape the conflicting part this is what we want one idea against another, and instead expand the idea pool.

[00:26:43] That would be my hope because, like I said, the media library is literally such a core component of WordPress. Images are so important on the internet and this is if we upgrade this and it’s just a cursory upgrade, we add some tags or whatever, We’re not setting ourselves up for, to be the

[00:27:10] William Bay: Right.

[00:27:11] Sé Reed: CMS because images are content.

[00:27:12] Media is content. We are not setting ourselves up to be the CMS leader because all of the other CMSs out there are surpassing our content management because we haven’t touched it. And so if we’re just going to bring it up to the level it should have been maybe in like 2018. It’s we need to take it to the next level and in order to do that, we need more input.

[00:27:37] Jason Cosper: you very

[00:27:38] Jason Tucker: Going back to what

[00:27:39] William Bay: you’re talking about I was just going to say, it’s, yeah, we might have mentioned this in the pre show, but it was just like that thread that we’re talking about, it really is just a re skinning of it, right? It is really just re skinning it and dropping it into the new Gutenberg editor and in, in a way, right?

[00:27:57] And that’s, that needs to happen, right? Like that, that world needs that building this in React means that it has to go into some kind of. Editor, Gutenberg editor esque kind of world, right? It has to come out of the PHP frame of the admin, and be a new thing, a new entity, right?

[00:28:22] Yeah. Mmhmm.

[00:28:24] Jason Tucker: Like editing forms in Gutenberg kind of thing. It’s just

[00:28:27] Sé Reed: And it all changed metaboxes, all of that stuff, yeah, I just, and you’re limiting the amount of space that you’re actually working in as well, because I feel like we’re I feel like the project is trying to put as many things as it can on the front end versus having a dashboard.

[00:28:46] Jason Tucker: Like they they don’t want to have a dashboard anymore. And I think sometimes some of these things like media needs to continue to live in the dashboard. Sure, there, sure, there should be a front end to it, but the thing in the dashboard should be someone who’s a staff photographer, who’s taking a bunch of photos for Vox Media or for the Washington Post or the whoever, any of these big, huge Companies that are using WordPress, they’re not the one who’s actually taking the photos and also writing the story.

[00:29:17] This is a project that has happened. So you need to start off with the project. So you need to have a folder that has all this crap in it. It’s going to have all the photos. The it’s going to have the hero photo at the top. It’s going to have the various photos in the middle. You’re going to have a little grid of photos.

[00:29:31] Like you have all these different pieces

[00:29:33] Sé Reed: Those all exist in Google Drive right now, for the most part. Let’s be real. That’s what people, that’s what people were putting that stuff and then collecting it there, and then having a copy of it there, and then putting it on this thing. And then managing I have many clients who manage their assets.

[00:29:48] Some use a digital assets manager, but most of them use Google Drive. And it’s just, it’s almost just as chaotic, but at least there’s freaking folders. Like that’s and I don’t know that folders are the future necessarily, but I do know that categories and taxonomy should not be limited to tags. And

[00:30:10] William Bay: I would like to see actually do away with categories and tags with as far as media is concerned and really focus on the and really focus on the EXIF and IPTC data, right? There’s already there’s already EXIF. We can extend that. I’m not sure this is gets into okay, how do you manage audio and video and that PDF so but as far as photography, you have exif information that you can pull from, and there’s already support for it in core.

[00:30:45] If you look at the REST endpoints, you see all that EXIF data. There’s not a lot, but there can certainly can be more. But you pull up there’s stuff for aperture, shutter speed captions. Captions actually should be utilized, captions and keywords should be utilized immensely.

[00:31:07] Sé Reed: But I just want to say, so all of that stuff that you just talked about, that’s all just metadata, right? So that is not that is not, that is just surfacing data that exists on the file. So that is just data displayed so you can search by it or whatnot. That doesn’t necessarily… Change the structure or the way that you get images, right?

[00:31:29] That just allows you to have more data to search by, more data that you’re able to put on the front end if you want to, or just having more access to data in that file. And to that end I just want to have a column that says, here are all the posts and pages in which this image is used, which is also just data.

[00:31:49] But it

[00:31:49] Jason Tucker: and that data is portable.

[00:31:51] William Bay: proposal.

[00:31:52] Sé Reed: Yeah, this is a proposal,

[00:31:53] William Bay: they’re actually

[00:31:54] Sé Reed: got it on the screen here and it’s got some experimental stuff. We’ll put the link in the show notes. I really recommend anyone who uses WordPress to go be a part of this discussion. I haven’t commented because I’ve just commented a lot on things lately, so I’m trying to lay low, if that’s

[00:32:13] William Bay: in this mock up, you’ll see the attached to, I think, in some of these, maybe the later mock ups that Saxon created or or Ramon. I’m not sure. I think it was Saxon that created these. But you’ll see I think maybe you’re pointing to it now,

[00:32:29] Jason Tucker: Yeah. Included in,

[00:32:31] William Bay: Yeah, included in.

[00:32:33] Sé Reed: But also that is visible when you click into the image, as opposed to… Again, on the main dashboard of the image, but really we haven’t even talked about image editing, which I personally am not the biggest fan of inside that. I don’t think that WordPress should be an image editor.

[00:32:53] A cropper maybe, like a focus image thing, like I want this to be the focus image, like things which are plugins that have never really worked for me, by the way. Actually in the feature set, that is actually one of the, one of the original feature set that Matias posted, not the additional features that are requested in like a whole redesign. So yeah focus focal point that you can just click on and then it just adjusts as a

[00:33:19] Right here. Yeah, that’s good for a bunch of stuff. But I think the thing is we don’t need like a star rating system because at this point, this is your five stars. These are all the things that have already been selected to show up on the website. You’re not like using this to manage

[00:33:35] William Bay: I all of your media.

[00:33:38] want to, I want to, I want a ranking system. Yeah.

[00:33:41] Sé Reed: Wait,

[00:33:41] Jason Tucker: Well,

[00:33:42] Sé Reed: a ranking system for what?

[00:33:44] Jason Cosper: on

[00:33:46] Jason Tucker: so in, in something like Lightroom or even photos or whatever is there’s typically some type of ranking system that you can use to determine, did this particular photo of the 5, 000 I just took of this one. Thing that’s happening here is the five star. Here’s the four star, maybe here’s a three star. And so that right there is what kind of makes it so that you can decide whether or not you’re going to use that. But I think the thing is you

[00:34:15] approaching this, but like for, I don’t think you’re going to be managing all of your photos in this

[00:34:20] Sé Reed: this doesn’t say, you’re not going to

[00:34:21] William Bay: No.

[00:34:22] Sé Reed: the whole selection of photos. You would only be uploading the five stars or the four stars, right? You wouldn’t

[00:34:28] William Bay: Am I sharing my screen now?

[00:34:30] Sé Reed: you are

[00:34:30] Jason Tucker: you will be.

[00:34:32] Sé Reed: Now you are.

[00:34:32] Jason Cosper: us

[00:34:34] William Bay: Yeah, so no,

[00:34:35] Sé Reed: your light room.

[00:34:35] William Bay: Jason’s point, yeah, to Jason’s point if you are uploading, it should be your four or five stars it’d be your best images that you’re looking for but yeah, this is you have ranking and color and flagging, this is this is going back to the dam, to the, to digital asset management, Lightroom is, Yeah, essentially a digital asset management, right?

[00:34:57] So you can have all your folders available. Here we go. Photos going all the way back to 1991 for me and then all the way through current. But yeah, so this is this is where you handle your keywording and then your editing experience also. So if you want to edit this photo,

[00:35:18] Sé Reed: just want to point out one thing real quick, because I was just looking at this github that I just put, said that we were going to put in the show notes where you did your comments. They closed it. It’s a closed ticket now. And the closing.

[00:35:33] William Bay: should be pointing to the new one.

[00:35:36] Sé Reed: But the closed ticket says, I’m going to close this branch, happy to continue the discussion here for the record until there’s a better place.

[00:35:43] I am so tired of, in WordPress, of saying we’re not having this conversation here, we’re going to have it somewhere else that doesn’t exist yet. We’re going to not have it here, but we’ll have it in an amorphous future, in an amorphous place that is not… Real, and like this is like the biggest shine on ever.

[00:36:01] I, you’ll close the issue where the conversation is happening unless you have another place to have the conversation.

[00:36:10] William Bay: Ramon did create a new ticket and I think he links

[00:36:14] Sé Reed: Alright. Is it LinkedIn here somewhere? Because I’m just like losing my mind. I just I like it is so hard already to track everything that is happening in this freaking project. And everything is buried in this is in the Gutenberg. Repo, by the way, this isn’t even in the core. The core one, this is happening in the experimental Gutenberg plugin, which is completely managed by full time sponsored devs, for the most part from certain companies.

[00:36:43] The fact that it’s even happening in Gutenberg is

[00:36:45] Jason Cosper: Okay. Okay.

[00:36:47] Sé Reed: decentralizing it from WordPress. The fact that this conversation and that thread was not linked in core media… We we have to be proactive in demanding, and I mean demanding, that these conversations happen in the open. I’m not even over here apart what they’re saying.

[00:37:10] I’m just saying, you can’t develop it over there by yourself and then just spring it on everybody. That’s just

[00:37:16] William Bay: Oh there’s another. Yeah, there’s not only that one. Like I said this is like multiple proof of concepts, by the way. Like multiple people started multiple threads on

[00:37:26] Jason Tucker: is no, there’s nothing wrong with that. Like they, we should have

[00:37:30] Sé Reed: I found the tracking thread, which is apparently tracking, it’s from three days ago and it’s now tracking. It’s got the conceptual designs on there. It’s got whatever. So we have the proper link. Just I feel like it’s you’ve got this link and then you started having this conversation and they’re like, Nope, don’t have that there.

[00:37:50] Go rewrite everything you just wrote over here because we’re not listening. Cosper, you had something brewing. What were you going to chime in with?

[00:37:57] Jason Cosper: I really think it’s pretty rich to me when people will drop stuff like this. And we’ve seen it not only here with the media library, but we’ve seen it in other concepts in Gutenberg, everything else. They’re like, here’s my idea. Let’s iterate on this. But the idea that they share is just a bunch of PNG screenshots that you can’t do shit with.

[00:38:26] Like basically give me something that I can import into Figma, into a design tool, into something where I can iterate on this, where I can actually share my ideas. It is a one way conversation. Here it is. The voice of God, here’s what we’re doing. Like you like it or complain about it and we won’t do anything about it, but this is what you’re getting.

[00:38:56] This is what’s for dinner. Enjoy.

[00:38:58] Sé Reed: yeah. And if you don’t like the peas, don’t eat the peas. That’s all you’ll

[00:39:02] Jason Cosper: right. Yeah. But the peas will be on your plate and.

[00:39:08] Sé Reed: take these.

[00:39:09] Jason Cosper: Yeah.

[00:39:09] William Bay: So you gotta

[00:39:10] Jason Cosper: this meal, there will be peas.

[00:39:13] William Bay: if you’re gonna invoke the voice of God, you gotta do it as Morgan Freeman.

[00:39:18] Sé Reed: Oh, please do.

[00:39:19] Jason Cosper: I

[00:39:20] William Bay: I’m not going to.

[00:39:21] Sé Reed: Oh, okay, I thought you were, like, gonna give us a little thing.

[00:39:24] William Bay: or if we’re in England, you have to do it as James Mason. Yeah.

[00:39:28] Sé Reed: Yeah My James Mason is even worse than my Morgan Freeman. So

[00:39:33] I wanna That’s their voice of God. Yeah, James Mason is the voice of

[00:39:37] Jason Cosper: of course

[00:39:38] Sé Reed: whenever you say Morgan Freeman, I just think about snakes on a plane, so I don’t know if that’s the voice of a god, but, it’s, that’s what it is.

[00:39:44] Jason Cosper: that’s Samuel L.

[00:39:45] William Bay: was in Snakes on a Plane.

[00:39:46] Jason Tucker: Thanks a lot.

[00:39:48] Sé Reed: That’s horrible of me.

[00:39:49] William Bay: What do you think all black

[00:39:50] Sé Reed: Forget I said that, shut up, do not even say this, not, no, I just don’t know anything about movies or names, people, celebrities,

[00:39:58] Jason Tucker: So what’s the, so what’s what’s our proposed solution that we’re looking here? Like it what would we want to have this actually like the conversation. So the way that we’ve had this, we’ve had this discussion a few times and now we’re in overtime. So I we might as well just talk about it this way.

[00:40:16] It seems like the developers want to have the discussion. As close to their code as possible, because then they can say, look, here’s my code. And the people that are presenters, they want to have their conversation close to their presentation. So they go here’s my presentation. And then you have the video people who like us, who are like, Hey, we want you to have a conversation.

[00:40:38] Guess where? In our comments. Taking this stuff and putting it into something like Slack, I get it, like it makes sense, but I think the problem is the people that are going to want that are producing the thing. They want their comments to exist next to their thing, so they can do the presentation and say, look, here’s my thing.

[00:41:01] Sé Reed: That’s why Figma would be a good option, because all of this stuff is iterated in Figma. Everyone’s obsessed with Figma, and everyone’s making the freaking WordPress editor look like Figma. I’m so

[00:41:10] Jason Tucker: but does Figma, I’ve never used Figma, but does Figma have a good enough solution to make comments, to It has a pretty good commenting system that is the one thing about Figma because you can comment in multiple spots it’s how on Google Docs you can add a comment to a specific area and you can do that in Figma.

[00:41:28] Sé Reed: So for iterating and for stuff like this, it actually makes sense. We used it for the design of the about page header and whatnot for 6. 4 and there was iteration. Shown there, like round one, round two, round three, like that made a lot of sense, people could feed in their comments, and then and obviously these were being done by six, four people, not the full time sponsored employees.

[00:41:51] So that’s probably why we were doing so much great iterating. But Figma does allow for commenting. So even if it was just in Figma, which you know that these graphics exist in Figma. Because that’s where they’re being made. So if we were sharing the Figma instead of the flat file, like Cosper was saying, then at least we could be like, Oh, I like this part over here.

[00:42:12] What if this were something else? Like we could get more, more

[00:42:15] William Bay: I think the issue with that right now is okay, you have devs and you don’t have, you don’t have like designer mockup or UI people involved and that, that’s a problem. And that.

[00:42:29] Sé Reed: whose name I can’t, last name, I cannot remember something with Fletch, I believe, but is a designer. And most of the design, most of the devs that are currently working on Phase 3 and Gutenberg are design first. And the entirety it is great in theory, except… There’s a lot of, like, when design leads everything, there’s actually a whole book about this.

[00:42:58] Jason Tucker: No. A book about design?

[00:43:01] Sé Reed: a book about design.

[00:43:02] William Bay: a book about a book about anything.

[00:43:04] Sé Reed: I will link it in the show notes. Maybe we could do a

[00:43:07] William Bay: Hey, are we going to put books in the media library? They are media, right?

[00:43:11] Sé Reed: We should be able to put one,

[00:43:14] William Bay: go in the media?

[00:43:15] Sé Reed: EPUB. I’ve never tried to put an EPUB. In the media library, but it should, that would make a lot of sense. What I’m trying to say here is that design is not the only thing that matters, right? When you have just design, you’re leaving, you leave on the floor so many things.

[00:43:35] You can

[00:43:36] William Bay: I’m, I when I say design, I’m talking about like user exp ui, right? Not designing it, but like implo implementing how those functionalities

[00:43:48] Jason Tucker: More UX. Yeah.

[00:43:51] William Bay: Yeah.

[00:43:52] Jason Tucker: part of it the actual, the way in which the workflows are going to occur.

[00:43:57] William Bay: we’re not designing a a we’re not designing a website. We’re designing UX

[00:44:04] Jason Tucker: Yeah. This is a difficult one to, this is a difficult one to solve because you have a few different people that are going to be using this. You have people that are wanting to sell images. So now you have WooCommerce involved or one of the other solutions involved. Then you have someone who, like you, who may want to, maybe you want to upload the largest file size that you want to be able to have people take a look at it, or maybe you want to sell it.

[00:44:30] So you want

[00:44:31] William Bay: Yeah, if you are

[00:44:32] Jason Tucker: version of it. And then here’s the higher quality version of it that you can be able to download. So there’s

[00:44:39] then you have people like me. Yeah, like where I just went to put the stuff on the page. So that way it’s in the correct format.

[00:44:46] And so that I can continue to have it in the correct format. So there’s a bunch of different people that are going to be using this in various ways. And maybe that’s why this hasn’t been solved yet. And so there’s all these plugins that have come out that are

[00:45:02] All sorts of crappy.

[00:45:03] Sé Reed: The book, hold on, the book that I was talking about is called Ruined by Design. And it’s I, we were actually talking about having this author on the show at some point, so hopefully we will, so everyone should read it so that we could have a little book club combo with them.

[00:45:19] The,

[00:45:20] William Bay: this is discussed, like whether it’s GitHub or if it’s some method through through what’s the mockup, sorry, you guys. Figma. Yeah. So whether it’s through Figma somehow, or I don’t know how that would work, but like, wherever it’s discussed it’s, we’ve got to get as many eyeballs on it so that we can get like publishers and video people and audio people and what should this look like?

[00:45:52] I coming from strictly new filter, trying to you And and when I talk about it, I talk about EXIF, but there’s all this stuff that is available out there to video and audio and PDFs and EPUB, right? Are we going to have like the ability to upload any media

[00:46:12] Sé Reed: so many

[00:46:14] William Bay: except

[00:46:14] Sé Reed: cases for this. The reason there are so many use cases for the media library is because every install of WordPress uses the media library. It is not the same thing as various plugins. The media library is core. If you have, like I said, if you have any image on there, you’re basically putting it in the media library.

[00:46:32] It touches every use case. I, I think I think the I think the font library that got booted to 6. 5 is leveraging the media library.

[00:46:46] I’m like, why are we modeling things off of what is already broken? I also

[00:46:50] William Bay: I hope it actually doesn’t, I hope the fonts don’t actually appear in the media library. I hope they have like their own,

[00:46:55] Sé Reed: It’s

[00:46:56] William Bay: You could, it’s an, you can still put it in the uploads folder, but have it in its own separate thing with its own separate interface, right? Like it shouldn’t be in media library.

[00:47:06] It could be on the uploads, but it shouldn’t be in,

[00:47:09] Sé Reed: to link that to everyone because that got punted to 6. 5 because there were issues. But I also just want to say, so there are, because this has been so long, and there have been so many problems with the media library that people have needed to fix with third party plugins, that there are a plethora of third party plugins that do a lot of these things.

[00:47:29] For example, yeah.

[00:47:31] William Bay: they say, what did they say? Blah, blah.

[00:47:34] Sé Reed: A plethora? A plethora is many. There are many.

[00:47:39] William Bay: no, are there no ThreeAmigos fans out there?

[00:47:42] Sé Reed: Oh no, sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Your age is showing. All right, anyway I got it.

[00:47:49] okay, I didn’t get it. My point is that there’s all these solutions, and this is what we’ve been doing with the block editor also. I feel like we’re designing we’re building in a silo, like we’re just like no, we’re not going to look at anything else.

[00:48:01] There’s no other paint builders that have ever existed. There’s no other plugins This plugin, the WP Media Library categories, like it’s a free plugin. There’s not a pro version. It’s developed by someone. Why are we not just taking that and bringing it in and not rebuilding things and saying, Hey, look, this already exists.

[00:48:24] It’s being used. Its code is current up to 6. 3. Like it is fine. Let’s bring in these solutions. Even just looking at all let’s do a survey of all of the plugins that deal with the media library and see which ones of these have features that obviously let’s look at the top installs. Who’s using

[00:48:44] William Bay: talking about, you’re not talking about actually doing research before you do a project.

[00:48:49] Sé Reed: I know it’s crazy. Not just randomly re skinning things like by design. I think this page should look like this, but instead having it based on actual data and information. Yeah, I know. It’s crazy. I have been… Yeah, I haven’t looked at, I haven’t looked at every single photography plugin out there. I have no idea what the feature sets are. I have an idea of what I want in my head and that’s just me, right? That’s just me.

[00:49:16] if you’re rebuilding one of the most important, significant components of one of the biggest content management softwares in the world, it makes sense to me to do a little research. And, if that research has been done, It makes sense to me to show that research as a backup to why this mockup looks like this.

[00:49:40] We designed this based off of XYZ research that we did. And then everyone would read that and be like, oh, that’s really interesting. And maybe not just have what this turns into is here’s my gut reaction of what it should look like design school experiment mock up, and then it’s like everyone else’s gut reaction to that one thing, to that one image.

[00:50:05] It really just narrows our conversation down to… Whatever that

[00:50:09] William Bay: One person’s, one, one person’s

[00:50:12] Sé Reed: one person’s perspective in a freaking global project or two people’s perspectives, two designers who are in a very specific design, whatever, yes, they’re steeped in the WordPress design brand or whatever, but They are, by nature of the fact that they are individual human beings, limited in their experience.

[00:50:32] And it just, it boggles my mind that we are still not taking advantage of this incredible global community that includes hundreds of executives and top leaders in their fields and people who use WordPress every day and power users and agencies, like There are plenty of people who have information about this, and I’m not going to say anything about the annual survey, but what if we did a survey and said, what are you looking for in the media library?

[00:51:09] And It’s, you bring up an interesting point, because like, how many of these new features that get introduced… you’re sure we have a beta process, right? But do we have a like a vote or a hey, what do you guys think? Or some kind of a process that happens before things get introduced.

[00:51:30] William Bay: So you get to a beta stage and it’s okay let’s take some actual user feedback. One of my biggest sticking points right now is the lack of involvement with agencies that work with clients, right? I was really pushing before I got laid off at WebDev Studios, I was, like, really pushing for having a liaison, and I would have been this person, to liaise with the the development teams on these features that You know, put out without any input from from different agencies and clients, right?

[00:52:11] Sé Reed: Using it every day.

[00:52:14] William Bay: And this is a big problem because we’re the ones making these sites for clients. We’re the ones that are interacting with the clients that use these feature sets, right? The biggest one that came to me was the how to add a link. Now it’s totally changed from just a couple, like a year ago, right?

[00:52:33] I think this came out in 6. 3, maybe. It’s you enter a link, you hit enter, you don’t have the options that used to show up when you hit enter, right? So now, you have to enter, highlight the link again, click on… Like the edit and then drop down the thing. And it’s I get, all I wanna do is make this launch into a new window or new tab.

[00:52:55] And now I have to have five or six new steps. Whereas before it was right in line with the link

[00:53:02] Sé Reed: And that, that right there is why design is not the be all end all of everything. Because designers like to hide things. They say, Oh, I want this to be streamlined. I want this to just be, here’s my thing. But what that does is it. It abstracts people

[00:53:18] William Bay: The, yeah. And it creates like a Fisher Price version without all the options, and then we’re just it might look slick, but it’s not functional.

[00:53:29] Sé Reed: Our goal is not to make it look

[00:53:32] Jason Tucker: this afternoon.

[00:53:33] Jason Cosper: are specifically why for the past five years all MacBooks only had one or two USB C ports on them.

[00:53:43] Sé Reed: great. This is, that’s a great example, the design of

[00:53:47] William Bay: I think that’s a cost thing.

[00:53:49] Sé Reed: the design of the MacBooks and like the battery, like how they were like, Oh, we can’t use this battery anymore because it has to like for the phones. And they’re like, Oh, we have to shrink it so much. So now we can’t have a. Hello, everyone.

[00:53:59] I don’t know what it was like the lightning plug won’t work or you can’t have the headphone jack because the phone has to be thinner and everyone’s but we have we want our headphones like we want to jack in our headphones

[00:54:09] Jason Tucker: I’m trying to put, I’m

[00:54:11] Sé Reed: no, it has to work

[00:54:11] Jason Tucker: notes together right now, and I had to know the name of the page first, before the URL. I had to go and find. I’m going to find the name of the book that we’re talking about, and then paste that into the post, and then highlight the text, go back and grab the URL, and then paste it back in there.

[00:54:31] I’m not writing the book name. I don’t even care what the book name is. I just need the book name to show up when I paste in this URL. And instead it wants to o embed the damn page because it goes, Oh, it’s a WordPress site. So like everyone uses these tools differently, but for whatever reason, we’ve all said, you know what, this is the way to do it because

[00:54:54] Sé Reed: one said that.

[00:54:55] Jason Tucker: built it this way.

[00:54:56] Sé Reed: We’ve all just, we all just accept it because what everyone thinks, in my opinion, is that someone is handling this, and someone is having these discussions, and someone is making these decisions based off of research, based off of data input, based off of information from the community.

[00:55:14] But that is not,

[00:55:15] William Bay: It’s not true. Yeah.

[00:55:16] Sé Reed: it is

[00:55:17] Jason Tucker: based off of new functions and new libraries that just came out and we’re going to build a thing off of it. And it’s okay, cool. I’m so glad that you got to use your new thing. But by the way, someone over at the post needs to be able to upload an image and they need to put together an entire project that they’re going to be posting and instead it’s mixed in with the header graphics that the art department threw in there.

[00:55:40] Don’t know. It’s. It’s so just thrown together. And I don’t understand how someone who works in a huge publication deals with this crap

[00:55:51] Sé Reed: They, a lot of them have bespoke systems and a lot of them have super customized media libraries even William was saying that there’s all sorts of plugins that exist that outsource the media library. It’s

[00:56:03] Jason Tucker: Some of these plugins

[00:56:04] Sé Reed: a component of the

[00:56:05] Jason Tucker: I’m looking at one right now called enhanced media library, right? It was updated two years ago. It has a hundred thousand plus installs and I’ve used this thing before. And it is not that great for what it is that I was trying to get it to do. And a lot of the time, these things are just like stuff that’s just bolted on top of the dashboard.

[00:56:27] And it’s you go into it and a full screen, as if like awesome motive or somebody wrote it, a whole screen thing pops up. And now you’re like editing, you’re editing a thing or something. It’s just this is, I don’t know, this was not the right way to do it.

[00:56:42] Sé Reed: Okay, I just want to say,

[00:56:43] Jason Tucker: what you’re trying to do, but this is this was set up a very weird way just for you and it’s not going to work for everybody

[00:56:51] Sé Reed: so if you do a search in the plugin repo, which I have just done, on media library, you, first of all, you can’t see how many plugins there are that come up for that, because it doesn’t give you that data, of course, anymore. It just here’s your search results, and those are the ones you get. Which…

[00:57:06] It’s a different topic, but there are literally, and I’m sure this comes up in things that aren’t specifically for the media library, but there’s literally more than there’s 50 pages of this, right? And all of these are like some 300 installs these are not small things. And All of these different plugins have various features.

[00:57:25] Most of them have categories, some of them have folders. Why? Because even if we’re not, even if we’re not taking these plugins

[00:57:33] William Bay: the

[00:57:33] Sé Reed: absorbing them, we could look at these plugins and say, what problems have these plugins been solving? And how can we incorporate that solution into Core? Even if we don’t even touch…

[00:57:45] We don’t have to touch their code or their plugin at all. We don’t have to assimilate their programs into the actual core. We could just see the, you can see by looking at these by looking at these plugins, what problems people have been having. Because these problems answer, or these plugins answer those problems.

[00:58:03] These are the solutions to those problems. It’s not, you don’t even have to do research of asking people. You can just research the plugin library as it exists. And

[00:58:13] William Bay: Yeah I like I

[00:58:15] Sé Reed: is being done, it is not being documented, and that,

[00:58:19] William Bay: I saw,

[00:58:20] Sé Reed: problem.

[00:58:21] William Bay: yeah, that is it is. And it goes back

[00:58:23] Sé Reed: Unused images,

[00:58:24] William Bay: But I was going to say see all the used images, let’s see everything that’s used on this page, like, all of this stuff is not rocket science it is not small use cases of 5 percent of people using it or whatever these are large use cases that, So many people want to use.

[00:58:47] Sé Reed: There’s like, how, there’s what was that six plugins on the first page that are about searching the media library? That’s

[00:58:55] Jason Cosper: Give me a view,

[00:58:56] Jason Tucker: into.

[00:58:57] Jason Cosper: yeah, give me a view where I can see sorry, William just give me a view where I can see everything that’s been used as a featured image, please.

[00:59:07] Sé Reed: oh I like

[00:59:09] William Bay: There’s a

[00:59:10] Sé Reed: I just want to bring in Otto’s comment from the things, if you could. Because it says, we don’t do it that way, because people, we don’t do it that, because people simply aren’t that way. Okay, creating something new is simply more fun than iterating on someone else’s idea.

[00:59:24] First of all, that’s not true. My personal preference is to iterate on someone else’s idea because I have an editing type of brain. I would much rather iterate on an existing idea than something I’m making up from scratch. I have not to bust that out, generalization out of the water, but it’s not true even amongst these four people.

[00:59:42] However, the assumptions that we make what you just said, Otto that people aren’t that way, or that’s not what people want. If you have data to back that up, a survey research, anything, awesome. If we’re just saying that because we’re basing it off of an assumption, Because of whatever assumption is going into that opinion, that is not what we should be building the CMS that powers 43 percent of the internet on.

[01:00:12] That, someone thinking that people are just that way, that, that’s not a reasonable data point. I’m sorry, it’s just not. So that is not a we’ve done it that way, great. Let’s not do it that way in the future. Because that way lies pain. There be dragons.

[01:00:33] Jason Cosper: That is a great thought, William, what were you going to say, and then I think maybe we should hit the

[01:00:39] Sé Reed: Yeah, I can’t believe we’ve been talking for an hour. So sorry.

[01:00:42] Jason Cosper: have

[01:00:43] William Bay: Yeah, so I was going to say, I saw a couple, I saw

[01:00:46] Sé Reed: Long walk for Jacob.

[01:00:47] William Bay: for, you going to let me speak or what? So there’s a couple of plugins for infinite scroll. I don’t know if you guys noticed when that was taken out. There was, it was, so in the media library, the default was infinite scroll.

[01:01:02] I don’t know if you remember this. And then they switched it to pagination, I guess for accessibility issues, but it was just removed. And I’m like, wait. What happened here? So one of the things I’d like to have in this new media library a feature is the ability to switch between infinite scroll, like the pagination that’s there currently, which you hit load more or actual pagination, right?

[01:01:29] Like one, two, three, four. So you have an option if you need accessibility issue, like you have accessibility issues, it could default to. Regular standard pagination, but if you want that infinite scroll, if you want to live with that, which I do, I like the infinite scroll, right? Then just have at it.

[01:01:48] Change your settings,

[01:01:49] Sé Reed: I like how we were like,

[01:01:51] William Bay: the ability. Change, change the change the way in which you’re able to view you can go from grid view to list view. What about the ability to…

[01:02:02] Sé Reed: I just need to say here that we said, let’s wrap it up, and then William’s all, wait, but infinite scroll. Hold on. It’s really important. Yeah. It’s the show we’re getting all here longer all the time. And I swear it’s not just because I’m ranting, it’s because WordPress, it’s so

[01:02:19] William Bay: No, this is like Jason said, what was your thoughts? And I said, okay, this is my thought right here, I’m, there’s not nearly enough time to include both my bitter, bitching and other people’s thoughts. It just, it does not, there’s

[01:02:34] Oh,

[01:02:35] Sé Reed: Just kidding.

[01:02:36] William Bay: I forgot this is the Sé show,

[01:02:38] Sé Reed: No, it’s not the same show. It’s the, it’s, I’ve just been working stuff out lately. There’s been some WordPress problems. I’m using this as my therapy, okay, because my therapist does not understand WordPress.

[01:02:48] Let’s just be clear

[01:02:49] William Bay: Mmmm!

[01:02:50] Sé Reed: Hey, wait, that would be a really great niche. I

[01:02:53] Jason Tucker: And with that, this is our

[01:02:55] William Bay: ha!

[01:02:56] Jason Cosper: to thank all of you for participating today.

[01:02:59] Sé Reed: wait, I thought we had more things to say. Listen on Apple Podcasts.

[01:03:06] Jason Tucker: You can also go hang out with us at all the various places that you can listen to a podcast. We would love to have you subscribe over there. Talk to y’all later. You have a good one.

[01:03:16] Sé Reed: We like to pretend we’re half an hour.