EP466 – The Media Library ends its silence

Episode Transcription

Speakers:
Sé Reed: 47.61%
Jason Tucker: 18.42%
Jason Cosper: 5.29%
William Bay: 28.68%
Sé Reed:[00:00:00]
5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0,
Jason Tucker:[00:00:09]
This is episode number 466 of WPwatercooler, The Media Library Ends Its Silence.
Sé Reed:[00:00:17]
was silent. The media library
Tucker. You can find me over at jasontucker. blog. Go
Sé Reed:[00:00:26]
Hey, I’m Sé Reed and I make things around the internet. Sé Reed Media on all the things! What?
Jason Cosper:[00:00:34]
And y’all know who it is, it’s your boy, Jason Cosper. I am the lizard king
Sé Reed:[00:00:41]
Hola, Sergei!
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.
Sé Reed:[00:00:49]
My guess is that you’ve already found us, if you’re here.
Yeah!
Sé Reed:[00:00:53]
I’ve always thought that was weird. It’s like, why are we telling people to subscribe if they’re already here watching it?
For the people who might be getting us in suggested videos.
Sé Reed:[00:01:07]
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.
William Bay:[00:01:31]
11 years ago.
right?
Sé Reed:[00:01:34]
once upon a time. No, I think it was 10 years ago, because we’re 11 years old, and you were on the
In a
Sé Reed:[00:01:40]
a world before Gutenberg. In a world.
before
Sé Reed:[00:01:45]
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
11 years
yeah. No one has done anything with it at all.
Sé Reed:[00:02:01]
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.
advisor
Sé Reed:[00:02:41]
I know you were
For the failed 2020 Word Camp San Diego.
Sé Reed:[00:02:46]
well, for something, yeah, 2020, nothing happened that year. Exactly. It was failed.
It was a cry for attention.
Sé Reed:[00:03:08]
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.
The same version of the media library,
That’s
Sé Reed:[00:03:22]
Library
We diffed it and nothing changed.
Sé Reed:[00:03:25]
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.
I’m
something there there’s a movement going on.
Sé Reed:[00:03:39]
tell us about yourself, William, or why you’re here, or how that wood life is going.
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
Sé Reed:[00:04:06]
People don’t say that a lot.
what’s that?
Sé Reed:[00:04:09]
People just, people say, I’m photographing. Is that like
I have been photographing.
Sé Reed:[00:04:14]
I photograph.
my, what was my,
So you,
Sé Reed:[00:04:17]
Anyway,
I adjective really do something inappropriate grammar. Grammarly. Yeah. Yeah. A bunch of EPS files and then what occurred?
I don’t think of a really old file format.
Sé Reed:[00:04:33]
That’s all it is.
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
Sé Reed:[00:04:54]
Photographers.
the way, I have I do have a media library with me today.
Sé Reed:[00:05:00]
Hey, that looks just like our media library in WordPress.
I saw the flaming lips in there That was a stack of CDs. Those are known as
a, yeah,
Sé Reed:[00:05:10]
discs for those of you who need to Google.
grid view list view, yeah,
Very
Sé Reed:[00:05:18]
That was a visual joke for all of you listening. But you should watch the show for that. I don’t know
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.
Better better to be happily unemployed than unhappily employed.
Yeah. I was very happy. By the way, I was very happy at WebDevStudios.
Sure.
unfortunate that a bunch of us had to get go, had to let go, be let go. But yeah,
Sé Reed:[00:06:04]
it’s the economy.
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.
Sé Reed:[00:06:28]
Okay,
right I know you’re proposing this stuff, but I don’t feel like this is enough.
Sé Reed:[00:06:35]
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.
Oh yeah, absolutely, yeah.
Sé Reed:[00:07:06]
Yeah, there have been no effective functionality changes.
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?
Sé Reed:[00:08:32]
poor channels in Make Slack. I cannot even.
So
Sé Reed:[00:08:36]
track them all.
You’re talking about like work going on, there’s so much to keep,
we’re
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.
Sé Reed:[00:09:01]
The TS Ventura Gutenberg,
Yeah, Matthias,
Sé Reed:[00:09:06]
right? That’s what you’re talking about?
yeah.
Sé Reed:[00:09:08]
Yeah. Full on Dan or go home. So
No I’m with Rachel for
Sé Reed:[00:09:14]
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?
go for it,
see
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.
Sé Reed:[00:09:34]
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?
Thank
repo where something was happening. Just a full…
for
Sé Reed:[00:10:36]
it to the show notes here?
us
yeah I’ll
we, it’s in the show notes currently, so we’re good.
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?
Sé Reed:[00:11:19]
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
It’s impossible.
Sé Reed:[00:11:29]
like, rational, one place to have a conversation, that people can provide feedback. You are living in a dreamland.
Thank you.
Sé Reed:[00:11:40]
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
add a little sugar.
Sé Reed:[00:11:51]
It’s been a rough time for me,
so we’ve seen a lot
sugar.
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.
Sé Reed:[00:12:53]
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
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
it in.
Sé Reed:[00:13:24]
Oh no.
And I was like
Did he did he type in img source equals, did he actually do all that?
Sé Reed:[00:13:33]
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.
It’s the guy, it’s the guy sitting in the booth with the laptop with the
Sé Reed:[00:14:04]
but I can’t go in and delete them because I don’t know where they’re being used. So I
Let’s
Sé Reed:[00:14:10]
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
I have done that.
Sé Reed:[00:14:28]
Right.
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…
Sé Reed:[00:14:59]
Would you like to use the photo that already exists instead of auto naming it under 4.
Cool.
Sé Reed:[00:15:05]
This
This matches an MD5 hash of an image that you’ve uploaded before.
Sé Reed:[00:15:12]
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.
Yeah. No, and
Sé Reed:[00:15:22]
looking because it does the underscore one, underscore two forever, right? So it already knows.
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.
Sé Reed:[00:15:45]
just use that photo.
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.
Sé Reed:[00:16:13]
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
Oh yeah.
Sé Reed:[00:16:23]
their messages, all their images. It is it is not just disorganized, that’s the thing.
That was just never, it was never a consideration.
Sé Reed:[00:16:50]
And also, it just hasn’t been touched in ten years.
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.
Sé Reed:[00:18:50]
shows up in
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.
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.
Sé Reed:[00:19:32]
template. it’s
Actual publish. You have actual publishers.
Sé Reed:[00:20:42]
and your dreams.
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?
Sé Reed:[00:20:53]
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.
but they’re not all, they’re not all on they’re not all
Sé Reed:[00:21:55]
know they’re not all on it, but that doesn’t
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.
Sé Reed:[00:22:27]
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.
I think there’s
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.
Sé Reed:[00:24:35]
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.
Oh, sure. Yeah.
Sé Reed:[00:25:22]
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.
Right.
Sé Reed:[00:27:11]
CMS because images are content.
you very
Going back to what
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?
Like editing forms in Gutenberg kind of thing. It’s just
Sé Reed:[00:28:27]
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.
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.
Sé Reed:[00:29:33]
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.
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.
Sé Reed:[00:31:07]
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?
and that data is portable.
proposal.
Sé Reed:[00:31:52]
Yeah, this is a proposal,
they’re actually
Sé Reed:[00:31:54]
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
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,
Yeah. Included in,
Yeah, included in.
Sé Reed:[00:32:33]
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.
I all of your media.
Sé Reed:[00:33:41]
Wait,
Well,
Sé Reed:[00:33:42]
a ranking system for what?
on
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
Sé Reed:[00:34:20]
this doesn’t say, you’re not going to
No.
Sé Reed:[00:34:22]
the whole selection of photos. You would only be uploading the five stars or the four stars, right? You wouldn’t
Am I sharing my screen now?
Sé Reed:[00:34:30]
you are
you will be.
Sé Reed:[00:34:32]
Now you are.
us
Yeah, so no,
Sé Reed:[00:34:35]
your light room.
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?
Sé Reed:[00:35:18]
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.
should be pointing to the new one.
Sé Reed:[00:35:36]
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.
Ramon did create a new ticket and I think he links
Sé Reed:[00:36:14]
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.
Okay. Okay.
Sé Reed:[00:36:47]
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.
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
is no, there’s nothing wrong with that. Like they, we should have
Sé Reed:[00:37:30]
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.
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.
Sé Reed:[00:38:58]
yeah. And if you don’t like the peas, don’t eat the peas. That’s all you’ll
right. Yeah. But the peas will be on your plate and.
Sé Reed:[00:39:08]
take these.
Yeah.
So you gotta
this meal, there will be peas.
if you’re gonna invoke the voice of God, you gotta do it as Morgan Freeman.
Sé Reed:[00:39:18]
Oh, please do.
I
I’m not going to.
Sé Reed:[00:39:21]
Oh, okay, I thought you were, like, gonna give us a little thing.
or if we’re in England, you have to do it as James Mason. Yeah.
Sé Reed:[00:39:28]
Yeah My James Mason is even worse than my Morgan Freeman. So
of course
Sé Reed:[00:39:38]
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.
that’s Samuel L.
was in Snakes on a Plane.
Thanks a lot.
Sé Reed:[00:39:48]
That’s horrible of me.
What do you think all black
Sé Reed:[00:39:50]
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,
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.
Sé Reed:[00:41:01]
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
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.
Sé Reed:[00:41:28]
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.
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.
Sé Reed:[00:42:29]
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.
No. A book about design?
Sé Reed:[00:43:01]
a book about design.
a book about a book about anything.
Sé Reed:[00:43:04]
I will link it in the show notes. Maybe we could do a
Hey, are we going to put books in the media library? They are media, right?
Sé Reed:[00:43:11]
We should be able to put one,
go in the media?
Sé Reed:[00:43:15]
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.
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
More UX. Yeah.
Yeah.
part of it the actual, the way in which the workflows are going to occur.
we’re not designing a a we’re not designing a website. We’re designing UX
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.
Yeah, if you are
version of it. And then here’s the higher quality version of it that you can be able to download. So there’s
Sé Reed:[00:45:03]
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.
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?
Sé Reed:[00:46:12]
so many
except
Sé Reed:[00:46:14]
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.
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,
Sé Reed:[00:46:55]
It’s
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.
Sé Reed:[00:47:09]
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.
they say, what did they say? Blah, blah.
Sé Reed:[00:47:34]
A plethora? A plethora is many. There are many.
no, are there no ThreeAmigos fans out there?
Sé Reed:[00:47:42]
Oh no, sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Your age is showing. All right, anyway I got it.
talking about, you’re not talking about actually doing research before you do a project.
Sé Reed:[00:48:49]
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.
One person’s, one, one person’s
Sé Reed:[00:50:12]
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.
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?
Sé Reed:[00:52:11]
Using it every day.
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?
Sé Reed:[00:53:02]
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
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.
Sé Reed:[00:53:29]
Our goal is not to make it look
this afternoon.
are specifically why for the past five years all MacBooks only had one or two USB C ports on them.
Sé Reed:[00:53:43]
great. This is, that’s a great example, the design of
I think that’s a cost thing.
Sé Reed:[00:53:49]
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.
I’m trying to put, I’m
Sé Reed:[00:54:11]
no, it has to work
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.
Sé Reed:[00:54:54]
one said that.
built it this way.
Sé Reed:[00:54:56]
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.
It’s not true. Yeah.
Sé Reed:[00:55:16]
it is
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.
Sé Reed:[00:55:51]
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
Some of these plugins
Sé Reed:[00:56:04]
a component of the
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.
Sé Reed:[00:56:42]
Okay, I just want to say,
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
Sé Reed:[00:56:51]
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…
the
Sé Reed:[00:57:33]
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…
Yeah I like I
Sé Reed:[00:58:15]
is being done, it is not being documented, and that,
I saw,
Sé Reed:[00:58:20]
problem.
yeah, that is it is. And it goes back
Sé Reed:[00:58:23]
Unused images,
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.
Sé Reed:[00:58:47]
There’s like, how, there’s what was that six plugins on the first page that are about searching the media library? That’s
Give me a view,
into.
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.
Sé Reed:[00:59:07]
oh I like
There’s a
Sé Reed:[00:59:10]
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.
That is a great thought, William, what were you going to say, and then I think maybe we should hit the
Sé Reed:[01:00:39]
Yeah, I can’t believe we’ve been talking for an hour. So sorry.
have
Yeah, so I was going to say, I saw a couple, I saw
Sé Reed:[01:00:46]
Long walk for Jacob.
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.
Sé Reed:[01:01:49]
I like how we were like,
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…
Sé Reed:[01:02:02]
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
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
Sé Reed:[01:02:35]
Just kidding.
I forgot this is the Sé show,
Sé Reed:[01:02:38]
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.
Mmmm!
Sé Reed:[01:02:50]
Hey, wait, that would be a really great niche. I
And with that, this is our
ha!
to thank all of you for participating today.
Sé Reed:[01:02:59]
wait, I thought we had more things to say. Listen on Apple Podcasts.
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.
Sé Reed:[01:03:16]
We like to pretend we’re half an hour.

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EP466 – The Media Library ends its silence

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