Media Picker UX: Quickly pick most recently uploaded media

[marcemarc]

When using the Media picker one of the most common interactions is to pick something you or another member of the editorial team has just uploaded into the CMS.

Now if you are creating content, and adding Media as you write, then this isn't an obvious issue, you just upload your new media and pick it, that editorial journey is catered for! - but If you are working in a team, you might not have uploaded the media, or your work may be spread over several editorial sessions - in a large site, it can be a pain to try and find where the Media was uploaded to, or can just take time to locate it - think /news/year/month/days folders - it would be super cool, to be able to toggle the media picker view to either show 'recently uploaded media' to pick from or 'recently uploaded to media folders' - to quickly navigate and see recently uploaded things (also reduces the chance of editors re-uploading duplicate images and files (it happens quite alot!!))

There are some considerations over user permissions, eg if you don't have permissions to see the media folder that has been most recently updated to, so this could get a bit messy.

If we create an api endpoint that lists 'recently uploaded to' media folders and/or 'recently uploaded media' - this would also be useful on the Media Section for editorial teams, to see what new images/files have been added to Umbraco.

I'm raising this as I'm a little concerned @kjac might not have enough to think about :-), but it's sort of also possibly related to this, if we introduced a toggle for listview then... #5259 opens up other possibilities like this...

... so if there is some sort of spike on Media Picker UX then be great to consider this feature, or equally valid reject it, so I can erase it from the back of my mind as a thing that would be good to do at some point.

[kjac]

I think this makes excellent sense. Perhaps this might spark some ideas in the UX mind of @nielslyngsoe too?

[nul800sebastiaan]

Note: we just merged PR #2441 that allows you to set up pickers to ignore the user's start node, so you could show the recently uploaded files that were made outside of their permission area too.

[nielslyngsoe]

Hi @marcemarc

Thanks for raising this very relevant issue, I think this issue is related to many of the daily tasks that are begin done by editors everywhere. And this problem can be applied to many scenarios — not only media and not only to find the latest in a folder — but multiple scenarios depending on the solution and the way their editors work.

How or if we will solve this in short term I cannot tell right now. But I can describe how I would love to see this working in an ideal world.

I would love us to expand the features of search in general — we should expand the search fields in Umbraco to be more clever and have better knowledge of the query begin constructed. The search-input should be able to contain tags, and those tags would be able to affect how your search will be presented, like sorting and filtering. Tags would be possible to apply by choosing them from a from a list of proposals that appears as you type.

Example 1.
Write: "Latest" and the tag "Order by latests" would appear beneath the search-input, by clicking it, it would become part of your search query. And performing this search would order the result to show latests entries in the top.

In this way we can make many features available without polluting the UI with all these options.

Tags could even be configureable as they are begin chosen.

Example 2.
Write: "Create by", pick the tag "Created by an author", a dialog will appear and you can pick one or more authors to filter your search results.

Example 3.
Write the name of a DocType, each DocType would exists as a filter that you can pick. If picked we would only show results that fits with the tags picked. For media picker that means that you could pick "Image", and thereby only find images.

This would be use-full in List-views if you have multiple types there.

All of the features should be possible to combine and we should think about ways to extend this, both in future version and locally through a package or similar extensions.

I hope to see that this solution would be the answer to this and multiple other issues that we are seeing here on the issue tracker. And I think this solution would be proven to provide great new methods to editors making their life easier.

To make sure that we will be looking into this and collection the knowledge and insights people have i have created a feature request/idea about this: #5361

[marcemarc]

Thanks @nielslyngsoe agree that superfying the search may be a great approach to solving the underlying issues here, anything that makes the editor feel like they are not hunting for things they have just created, will have a big positive effect on the day to day editing experience - with specifically the Media Picker in mind - I think being able to toggle between showing images/icons and a listview would also really help with the search results - identifying which version of similar looking images they want to pick eg seeing the create date, and the filename easily - created an issue here: #5259 regarding that possible toggle option. (https://youtu.be/NsmOnXJY1gg)

[umbrabot]

Hiya @marcemarc,

Just wanted to let you know that we noticed that this issue got a bit stale and might not be relevant any more.

We will close this issue for now but we're happy to open it up again if you think it's still relevant (for example: it's a feature request that's not yet implemented, or it's a bug that's not yet been fixed).

To open it this issue up again, you can write @umbrabot still relevant in a new comment as the first line. It would be super helpful for us if on the next line you could let us know why you think it's still relevant.

For example:

@umbrabot still relevant
This bug can still be reproduced in version x.y.z

This will reopen the issue in the next few hours.

Thanks, from your friendly Umbraco GitHub bot 🤖 🙂

[marcemarc]

@umbrabot still relevant

Think this is still relevant, it would still assist editors, when using the Media Picker to pick from the latest Media items added to the backoffice, rather than searching or navigating folders.

[nul800sebastiaan]

I think this is now resolved with the PR to get a list with last updated items that's sortable, so I'll close this issue!

[marcemarc]

@nul800sebastiaan All for closing issues! - but just wanted to point out that the ordering by date, is only within a certain folder... so that doesn't satisfy the 'Quickly pick the most recently uploaded media' that this issue originally related to - eg if Mary uploads eight new images to Media/Blog/2021/April/Top10BestFishBlogPost folder, then someone picking them will need to navigate to that folder to be able to order by last updated - the idea here - which might not be worth doing... is that when you go to pick the media -it is almost a different way to 'search' rather than 'navigate' = then you press a button, and it shows images in recently uploaded order... regardless of which folder they are in.