All things media manager....

[crystalenka]

Problem we're trying to solve:

The media manager has several UX and a11y issues, both dealing with the media manager in general, the actions, as well as media fields and the modal.

Please note that some of the below are people expecting things to work a different way than they do; that's still a usability bug because we're setting the wrong expectations.

Some are filed as issues:

• Media Manager Info Bar joomla-cms#39078
• [4.2] Problem with field Angle in Media/Rotate joomla-cms#39060
• Not able to upload svg file joomla-cms#38532
• Media Field CSS RTL joomla-cms#38354
• [4.3] Media Manager SVG File joomla-cms#38068
• Media Manager - Additional Data - Popup - Improve labels on screen  joomla-cms#38100
• Modal-Dialog for joomla-field-media not accessible with iOS joomla-cms#38115
• [4.1] Media Edit Quality has no effect joomla-cms#37598
• [4.1] Image and Figure User experience joomla-cms#37380
• [J4] Media Manager UX/Performance Improvements joomla-cms#36533
• Changing media folder does not work joomla-cms#35689
• [4.0.3] Media manager: missing "Save as", missing "warnings", edits lost after Tabs switch. joomla-cms#35651
• [4.0] Different multi-select behavior in media manager joomla-cms#33637
• [4.0] Resizing template images does not have an option to keep proportions joomla-cms#33180

Others are discussions:

• Media Manager Issues joomla-cms#34927
• Image Alt Text should be a textarea instead a text input ? joomla-cms#38968
• [4] media manager modal height joomla-cms#32039
• [4.1] media storage folder joomla-cms#36118
• [4.0] Fix image handling in media manager joomla-cms#36157

And of course countless posts in the forums and across unofficial social media groups.

A large part of the challenge is that so much of the media manager is built in Vue, which makes it hard (if not impossible) to address even minor bugs for the average contributor. It also effectively shuts out the development of new features of the media manager because very few people know how; those that do, don't necessarily have the time or motivation.

Possible solutions include:

This is... a lot. I don't really know. We can talk these one by one for minor things, but there are some larger patterns that need to be reworked. We need a discussion to determine the best way forward for everyone.

Things to remember as we discuss this issue:

• A lot of people have already put in a lot of work to make the new media manager.
• With that in mind, we also need to be wary of the sunk cost fallacy.
• Any proposed solutions need to comply with WCAG and ATAG for accessibility.
• Bits of the media manager are called in different contexts: com_media, the media select field, the accessible media field, sometimes within editors, etc.
• There are third party extensions for the media manager which will be affected by any changes.
• Joomla 5 promised no B/C breaks.

Frankly, I'm at a loss when facing this. There was a project for media manager improvements that was archived, I don't know the context of that.