Image Resize
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Lot of folks complaining about the loss of percentage resizing of images. Undoubtedly that was better than the present four options system: thumbnail, small, medium, and large. But the best tool for precise resizing was the corner dragging tool. I haven’t read all of the above messages, but I didn’t find one mention of this important feature. It allowed for exact pixel adjustment of both width and height, with both of the dimensions shown in a tooltip beside, or over the image being edited.
The dragging feature is still functioning, but the tooltip part of the feature was removed. The dimensions have also been abolished from the visual editor. They used to be in what is now called the “image details.”
To not have the width and height available in the visual editor > image details appears to be the result of either
1. remarkable oversight
2. bizarre and incomprehensible whimsy, or
3. an obstinate or perverse desire to remove a useful feature regardless of the impact it will have on users’ ability to edit images quickly and with ease. -
I forgot to mention that I’ve used the image corner dragging feature, with tooltips, to edit and tweak images for at least the past four years. Often every day of the week, for the past four years.
Why?
1. It was by far the easiest and fastest method of doing precise image size editing. As someone mentioned above, pre-upload setting of image sizes (whether in the interest of optimizing or otherwise) doesn’t help you wrap text around an image with precision. It doesn’t necessarily help you find a size which is appealing to the eye. It doesn’t help you to find a compromise between the size you’d prefer, the best image quality, and an attractive fit within text, others images, or what have you. The corner drag method, with tooltip sizes automatically displayed while editing, was best-suited for such precise work.
2. It was only easy way to get a pair of images to fit side by side. Each theme has a maximum width. The max is applied to side-by-side images just as it is for a single image. If your pair of side-by-side images is too wide, the second image bumps down to the next line. Now we’re left guessing, estimating, widths and heights, or having to repeatedly hunt for the sizes in the text editor.
3. The handy tooltip sizes saved one from having to go into the image details to find the dimensions. For those who couldn’t see the tooltips, for whatever reason (e.g. mobile device users), the sizes were available at a click in the details. Now, whimsically, perversely, or through some impenetrable variety of obscure reasoning, both have been abolished. -
Modifying width and height is still available through Edit Image/ Scale Image.
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Hello
The borders were accessible from the former editor of images, very simply.
Why should I suddenly take a pay CSS editing option?
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@ainkarateshotokan
you ask why? because so you will spend 2 hrs just for one post and in the future you will have to buy more space. simple! -
@ murrayfoote,
Thanks. That feature might be a satisfactory alternative for some of the folks missing the “percentage resizing.” But for my purposes it doesn’t come remotely close to replacing the corner drag method, which is apparently some deep secret. I know that I was unaware of it until either a support volunteer or staff member told me about it over four years ago. I’ve used it exclusively since then. It is/was simplicity itself. The dimensions, displayed in a tooltip, sometimes known as a “hover box,” were activated by the drag method of editing itself. The drag method is still available, but immediate access to the precise dimensions are gone from the visual editor.In a nutshell: You click on the image to display little dragging squares at each corner of the image.* The tooltip used to display the exact pixels, width and height. This was functioning nearly perfectly** for over four years, until about a week ago.
*There are also squares at the midpoints of all four sides, but using these to drag-edit the image will result in altering the width to height ratio, distorting the image.
**I say “nearly perfectly” because the sizes could be blocked by the edge (right or left side) of the editor if an image/images was/were too wide, or by a finger point cursor.
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I see this is growing, and still little word from the staff on what is actually being done to address it.
I have just started using the text editor to get my images right, even though it takes more time. I tend to embed a fair deal of images in my posts, and fiddling about the plain-text to get them right is making it more cumbersome.
I did always have a set measurement for my images though, so changing the width and height in the text editor is fairly straight-forward. I’ve found that 580 x 320 tends to fit a widescreen image into the typical WordPress display fairly well.
As for getting mouse-over text, I enter what I want into the new simplified editor’s “Alt-text” box, and then I go into the text editor and change “alt=” to “title=”, and the mouse-over stuff works again. As I also always link to the URL of the image, I tend to move it from the <img> to the tag, just to be safe, as that’s how old WP did it when I set my advanced options as desired.
And when it comes to making it automatically open in a new tab, I just copied the “target=”_blank”” and slotted that under the tag. So the finished result would look something like:
It works, but it was so much easier and quicker to do under the old editor.
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Again, as with the hundreds of other posts, I’m asking … why DECREASE functionality? why dumb it down by removing Advanced options? Surely it’s better to have all the options available and then those who don’t need them AND those who DO can continue to blog the way they have been doing. On so many other threads, support staff post ANSWERS to questions. Why is this – an issue that has led to HUNDREDS of cries for help on one thread – receiving only the occasional ‘workaround’ reply with no answers as to WHY this was done and if there is any intention at all of restoring the level of functionality that the Advanced options gave us? I’d imagine that a large percentage of WordPress users choose to be so because they DON’T want to spend huge amounts of time coding. So when those are the suggestions we’re being given, it seems to be a huge backward step and, in some ways, the inference at the moment is that those of us who are concerned about this don’t matter so we have to ‘make do’ with going back to the horse and cart because they took away our snazzy motor car. Please, WordPress staff, if you can’t tell us WHY it’s gone … at least tell us that you’re working on a way to restore it. Or are the people who have indicated they might have to blog elsewhere just an irritation that you’ll be glad to be rid of?
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Okay, I didn’t expect it to actually interpret my tags as commands in the forum… can I delete or edit my old post in any way here? Because as it is, it just looks like a mess.
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Apparently not. Okay. Let me try again, but with [] symbols instead of <>.
For linking an image to directly opening in a new tab, and having mouse-over text, the plain-text would look something like this:
[a title=”This is an image.” href=”http://this-is-an-URL.jpg” target=”_blank”][img class=”alignment” src=”http://this-is-an-URL.jpg” alt=”” width=”580″ height=”320″ /][/a]
Did that work? I hope so.
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sorry. i have no time to waste re-adjusting all the most important posts i created in more than 2 years. i am doing art and design and now my blog seems really cheap! so please at least adjust the following posts, re-sizing all the images in 540×360 without border for:
– GPM;
– 47;
– va por la hora;
– a ray of sun;
– go russia go.
you are really a team of genius! -
have you seen the gallery they suggest to use as grid? absolutly boring, unoriginal, banal, like a postcard for a kindergarten…wake up WP!!!
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@varewulf, I think I understand the first part of this! You wrote:
“As for getting mouse-over text, I enter what I want into the new simplified editor’s “Alt-text” box, and then I go into the text editor and change “alt=” to “title=”, and the mouse-over stuff works again. As I also always link to the URL of the image, I tend to move it from the <img> to the tag, just to be safe, as that’s how old WP did it when I set my advanced options as desired.”One question though….I don’t usually link to the url…for no good reason I can think of, I’ve always clicked the box that gave the pics an attachment page. Will your example work in this instance or do I need to click the box that links directly to the image?
I came to WP in 2011 with no understanding of HTML. I can say with 100% truth that i STILL don’t know a dang thing about it, or CSS for that matter–I can’t even visualize what CSS looks like, what it is, or where it comes into play! None of this mattered because WP allowed me to create a blog that people repeatedly call GREAT, EDUCATIONAL, and STUNNING. This is what I LOVED most about the old visual editor–it allowed me, an average 57yr old woman, to create a product that looked like she paid a webmaster to do!
FYI: I’m not lazy, or averse to learning new things; I’d rather spend my time researching my blog’s subject matter and creating great content! Dealing with this new editor takes away from all that and this is the source of all my frustrations!
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I saw somewhere in a Forum that “Happiness Engineers” are promising more exciting upgrades soon. I am afraid to say that this information has me dreading the day that the “downgrades” are implemented.
The continued silence on this issue is truly perplexing.
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Hi small house/BIG GARDEN (a beautiful blog with an About page that sings like a happy gardener’s version of Poe’s El Dorado),
One question though….I don’t usually link to the url…for no good reason I can think of, I’ve always clicked the box that gave the pics an attachment page. Will your example work in this instance or do I need to click the box that links directly to the image?
From what I’ve seen,
1. If you want NO LINK on the image, the only way currently to create the hover text / tooltip is via HTML text edit.
2. For linking to any of the three options — media file, attachment page, or custom URL — you can get the hover text by HTML, too,
or
3. by assigning the link to the image by using the Link button on the editor toolbar (but you need to have the URL handy for the media file or attachment page). Click the image, then click the toolbar Link button, and enter the URL same as you would for a text link, with the checkbox option to open in a new window.
In that link dialog box, what you put in the Title field becomes the hover text. No HTML editing.
Both ways are clumsy and more work than before. The link button approach means you have to grab the URL from the image editor link section first (copy&paste). Used to be you could assing a tooltip and choose the target window right in the Image Editor. The times they are a-changin’.
So many new people joining this thread (largely sent here by WP staff and other helpers – because this is where we create all the answers … i.e., work-arounds, to help each other), as with old people in this thread :-) ask for an explanation for the Visual Editor Downgrade.
So far, Happiness Engineer jackiedana offered the only cogent and comprehensive explanation I’ve seen.
Paraphrasing: “Just you wait. It’s gonna be really good when we get done with the upgrade to WordPress 3.9 [we’re now using Beta 3 of that, last I checked].” She also said that it is “not possible” for them to give us a summary/preview/foreshadow of the great stuff to come. In effect, she said, “Trust me!”
Now that you have this explanation, you can stop wondering why they downgraded the editor, right?
To be fair, I’ll let her speak for herself (from the New Visual Editor Concerns thread):
March 27, 2014, 2:17pm
I can assure you that nothing is being “downgraded”. These are all changes that are coming with WordPress 3.9 that are geared to improve the overall user experience. That will be the standard WordPress version for all self-hosted users, and we have those changes in the specific WordPress.com code now.March 27, 2014, 6:25pm:
We believe the changes are making WordPress.com (and WordPress as a whole) better. There are indeed tradeoffs whenever you change or remove a feature, and some users will mourn those changes while others will applaud (or not even notice) the changes. It’s inevitable with all software.When online services (think Facebook and Gmail) or desktop software change things, sometimes it’s really a pain in the neck for a while, but we all adapt and in the end, almost always forget how things were before. In this world, this kind of change is inevitable as we all try to make our products better.
As far as announcing things in advance, that’s really not possible for a platform such as ours that makes changes every single day of the week. Literally. What we do try to do is post about our biggest changes and new features once they go live on our blog, http://en.blog.wordpress.com/
March 28. 2014, 12:02am (she’s working ’round the clock):
I’d encourage you to give WordPress.com a little more time and play with the new changes for a bit before dismissing it entirely. If you run into any other issues, just let us know.See? It’s “inevitable” things should be like this.
So folks can stop wondering why and worrying we might be screwed. Just you wait. It’s gonna be so great. Really! They mean it!
It’s all going to work out nicely in the end. It always does.
Still, I would not recommend taking the fire away from their feet. Be good beta testers and keep reporting what this downgrade is doing to your WordPress blogging experience. This is important to them.
What? You don’t think so? Trust me.
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@balsamean Methinks you overlooked the most important thing Nurse Ratched — er, jackiedana — said:
“… but we all adapt and in the end, almost always forget how things were before.”
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I am having problems with photos since the update. I really miss the percentage option for the photos. I go to the image box to have a photo centered, then when the blog is published it is off center and there is too much space between photo and text underneath it. Am also having problems posting text below the photo, since I am forced to type text above the photo, so am now forced to position photos to the right, so I can type to the side of the photo, even though I don’t like it that way. My blogs used to look good when they are published, but now they look very sloppy looking, with the separation of photo and text. I have made over a 1,000 posts and never had problem till the last few days. I think it would be nice to have the option of using the old way again, if we want to choose that option. Thank you very much.
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I think we’re the victims of continuous ad-hoc changes. That might be OK for minor refinements of existing functionality but not for wholesale replacement of major features. It’s not merely that the changes are a downgrade for many or most users, there are also numerous bugs, probably because different themes react differently with the image editing interface. Clearly our reaction was not anticipated.
It appears that developers and system architects (unhappiness engineers as they appear to be at the moment)
• Need to better understand their product and the requirements of their users
• Need a comprehensive usability lab testing process so they can test the effects of all kinds of usage with different themes before migrating the changes
• Should release beta versions of major changes so there are no surprises on final release
• Should be prepared to roll back if unanticipated problems appear
• Should be more open about their intentions and what they can and can’t do in a specified timeframe. -
I just tried again to use photos, but had so many problems, with type appearing where I don’t want it to, that I will just stop using photos till the problem is fixed. It is just too much aggravation to try to type something below a photo and have it appear above the photo. I will have to revert to a text only blog, since I am wasting too much time trying to use photos.
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