Can I attach an image uploaded to one post to a second without uploading again?
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The shortcodes with image IDs have also allowed me to put slide shows in posts/pages in which the images were not uploaded. This was impossible until the change last year. I really appreciate that benefit.
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The shortcodes with image IDs have also allowed me to put slide shows in posts/pages in which the images were not uploaded.
This doesn’t conflict with what I’ve been saying, although it may seem to. The way I’ve been doing this for the past year or so (since fairly soon after the major WP gallery design changes) is to upload images from files as usual to one page, and then copy and paste the shortcode in any satellite pages on which I want the same gallery, or any part of it. I hadn’t realized that I could the skip the attaching by uploading directly to an unattached pool, even though I had an unattached pool (accumulated unintentionally).
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BUT you are missing out on taking advantage of the huge update that WordPress.com made to the Gallery feature last year.
This was my main point too. The old shortcode still works, and relies on images attached to a post or a static page, but the new shortcode relies on image IDs (every image you have ever uploaded to your blog has its own unique ID number). And that’s why I was puzzled when you wrote you “copy and paste the gallery”: if you copypaste the new shortcode, your problem simply doesn’t exist.
Your main concern seems to be with transferring galleries from one post/page to another. If you have inserted the new shortcode into post A then copypaste it into post B, you can then delete the shortcode from post A, set post A to draft, trash it, delete it permanently, and you don’t lose the gallery from post B (as long as you don’t delete the images from your media library).a lost or accidentally deleted shortcode may be lost forever, though it may be found among the 25 archived revisions. This could still leave me hunting among thousands of unattached images for 10 or 100 images needed to reconstruct a gallery accidentally deleted.
Aren’t you exaggerating a little? You want WP to make things super easy for you if you insert a gallery into a post, delete it, then, say, two years later you change your mind and you want that gallery back even if you’ve made more than 25 revisions to that post after deleting the gallery? If you find this a likely scenario (I don’t) then my advice is: learn to be more systematic; for example, organize the images in your computer in subfolders, by post; or backup your posts.
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justpi,
With all due respect, please spend a half hour looking around my site sometime and then tell me that it not organized. Yes, there is room for improvement, but some of the “errors” are not due to negligence but to 1.) not having the tools I needed to do something more efficiently and so making do with what I had, or 2.) being unaware of available better ways of doing something for an extended period of time and suffering the consequences.
Everything I’ve described has happened. No far-fetched scenarios, although I understand that it may seem so.
Here’s the thing. If I were to begin a new site projecting hundreds of posts and pages, and several thousand gallery images spread across the site, I might not attach images to any posts and pages (or perhaps do so infrequently), but rather upload most of images to be used to an open pool, the unattached section, from which I could then freely borrow from as I go about creating galleries anywhere throughout the site without attachments.
And I might decide in my new found wisdom to not duplicate posts as pages and pages as posts, each with duplicate images and sometimes duplicate galleries.
And I might not leave old, unused or replaced edits of images, and similar looking alternate images, in the Media Library so that when I decide to add a photo of Mr. X. to page Z I don’t find 6 or 8 copies, or close twins, of the same photo to chose from, not knowing
a. which 2 or 3 are attached to the original post, and its gallery
b. which 2 are attached to the duplicate page and its gallery
c. which 2 or 3 aren’t attached at all, but are floating freely among a few thousand others.Is it asking to much to wish WordPress could tell me at the Insert Media or Create Gallery module the following:
1. if the image is attached anywhere?
2. where it is attached, if it is attached?
3. if the image is unattached?These details and other important ones can be found by going directly to the Media Library from the dashboard, but not (as far as I can figure out) from the Media Library as displayed in the Add Media/Create Gallery module.
Okay, let’s suppose I was not so lazy or short-sighted to have created all those extra, unused, duplicate and alternate versions of a single image in the Media Library to complicate things. We’ll suppose I’ve been diligent enough to have no duplicates of images in the Library. No duplicates of posts, or pages, or the images and galleries contained in them.That scenario is so far from where I am now that it seems like a monumental task to get from here to there. I’ve already spent several hundred hours this year trying to clean up the mess of unattached images left behind when 50 or more posts were deleted in favor of retaining the duplicate pages, and trying to eliminate some of the hundreds of images which are attached to pages and posts but not displayed for various reasons.
But we can suppose that I have that perfectly orderly site, with no extra images and no unwanted duplicates. How I will get to that point is hard to say, but we’ll imagine it.
We’re still left with some problems, including the following: Finding the image you want among 9,000 unattached images in the Media Library can still be like finding a needle in a haystack. They are ordered primarily by date.The images in my personal files are always ordered a lot more systematically than are the images in the Media Library.You want WP to make things super easy for you if you insert a gallery into a post, delete it, then, say, two years later you change your mind and you want that gallery back even if you’ve made more than 25 revisions to that post after deleting the gallery? If you find this a likely scenario (I don’t) then my advice is: learn to be more systematic; for example, organize the images in your computer in subfolders, by post; or backup your posts.
25 revisions is not a safe amount. I’ve done 25 revisions on single post or on gallery in an hour at times.
My personal image files are ordered systematically, by date, alphabetically, by category, and subcategory. This orderliness is very helpful when it comes time to using preselected images in a post, or to a create a gallery. But how does this help me with respect to images once they are in the Media Library? My preference for orderliness is probably one of the major factors in why I’ve rejected routinely using unattached images in the Media Library in the manner we’ve discussed to the extent that I’d forgotten it could be done.
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Important point I might not have appreciated sufficiently to make me act on it sooner.
Perhaps 70% or more of my 200 someodd galleries are still of the form [gallery], in some cases with column number or size specifications added. They don’t automatically update to the new form of gallery with an ID for each image.
Updating these might be an essential first step toward solving my image and gallery issues.
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Perhaps 70% or more of my 200 someodd galleries are still of the form [gallery], in some cases with column number or size specifications added.
This eliminates the possibility of a mass conversion of Media Library images to unattached status. Apparently bulk edits of this kind are not available to WordPress.com administrators or users anyway, but even if they were I couldn’t do it without causing 70% of the galleries to disappear.
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I should have added to my post at Oct 11, 2013, 1:41 AM, the original problem posed at the start of this thread “How to attach an image without uploading again” remains because along with attaching the image to a new post/page, I want to delete the original post/page. I guess because I still have so many galleries in the old shortcode format, often when I delete a post or page containing a gallery which I want to duplicate in a new post/page, the images are scattered among the unattached section of the Media Library, and must be retrieved one by one to assemble them in the new post and gallery.
It may not be a typical problem, because I suspect few WP bloggers have had as many gallery-containing posts duplicated as pages, and vice versa, as I have. And even fewer have decided to rapidly remove most of the duplicates.
I mentioned above deleting 50+ duplicate and unnecessary pages in May of this year. I’ve been thinking back to that time, that large cleansing project, and my recollection now is that the number was at least 100 posts and pages deleted this Spring in a very short time. That threw at least a thousand (perhaps two thousand) images previously well-ordered and attached to posts or pages into disordered, unattached status. These images often become scattered throughout the Media Library since a. the Library is ordered by date of creation, and b. the gallery images aren’t necessarily all added to the gallery on the same date, or even in the same year. There were so many duplicates and alternate edits of images that I mistakenly deleted a lot which shouldn’t have been, resulting in hundreds of 404 errors throughout the site.
The number of images thrown into disorder would have been fewer had all of my galleries been updated to include image IDs (and not just the 20% or so I probably had updated by then), but it wouldn’t have saved the images on pages where galleries were created but not displayed, which would have been the typical case in May and still is, from getting scattered by the deletions.
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Is it asking to much to wish WordPress could tell me at the Insert Media or Create Gallery module the following:
1. if the image is attached anywhere?
2. where it is attached, if it is attached?
3. if the image is unattached?You can suggest this in the Ideas forum.
With all due respect, please spend a half hour looking around my site sometime and then tell me that it not organized.
My personal image files are ordered systematically, by date, alphabetically, by category, and subcategory. […]. But how does this help me with respect to images once they are in the Media Library?
Finding the image you want among 9,000 unattached images in the Media Library can still be like finding a needle in a haystack.
often when I delete a post or page containing a gallery which I want to duplicate in a new post/page, the images are scattered among the unattached section of the Media Library, and must be retrieved one by one to assemble them in the new post and gallery.
I didn’t talk about your site, I talked about your computer, and suggested organizing your images by post. This doesn’t help you with the media library, it helps you with re-uploading the right images, because that’s more practical than searching for them in your media library (for the reason you mentioned). For your present situation, and the present state of the WP media tools, the best I can suggest is visit each actual post/page you want to delete, copy the images to your computer (in a separate folder for each separate post/page), create new posts/galleries the new way (Add Media > Create Gallery > Upload).
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I didn’t talk about your site, I talked about your computer, and suggested organizing your images by post.
I was talking about my computer files, too, my personal files are kept first in Windows XP documents folders and moved periodically to an external HD. And I agree that organizing them by post is a good idea. I’ve done that fairly frequently in the past couple of years. But not so often prior to that. It can provide a good backup in case of accidental loss. I have in fact used pre-ordered files in my to recreate lost galleries on a couple of occasions.
For your present situation, and the present state of the WP media tools, the best I can suggest is visit each actual post/page you want to delete, copy the images to your computer (in a separate folder for each separate post/page), create new posts/galleries the new way (Add Media > Create Gallery > Upload).
It might come to that.
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Finding the image you want among 9,000 unattached images in the Media Library can still be like finding a needle in a haystack.
I have to admit that this is an exaggeration. Yes, I have over 9,000 images in the Media Library, but I’ve seldom had to search through all of them to find an image. Names, and other keywords used in the image titles usually limit the searches of the Library well below a hundred, sometimes to a dozen or less.
Nevertheless, the other factors I’ve mentioned (attachment status and location unidentified in the Add Media module, and numerous idiosyncratic factors) can make such searches difficult, often requiring searching through the Media Library directly as well as through the Add Media module, and investigating pages or posts in the case of attached images where there are mulitiple similar images involved (duplicates, various edits, alternates).Digging Holes
One of the reasons that I have so many images with multiple edits on this site is that for at least 18 months, early in my WordPress blogging days, I used a defective monitor. It was almost always too dark, but it was also inconsistent. It varied quite a bit from day to day, and week to week, lightening and and darkening by itself. Most of the time, though, everything was too dark, and getting darker over time. Refusing to accept the evidence, I spent countless hours for at least a year and half lightening perfectly fine images before uploading them to Songbook and many other sites.Finally, I realized my great blunder and began the tedious process of darkening those thousands of images again, or hunting through my files to find the original images if they managed to survive one of the crashes that periodically wiped out all of my image files before I learned to backup with external HD. Thinking of this episode, now, reminds me how they used to make soldiers dig holes and then immediately fill them up again, for discipline or punishment.
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