I don’t like the WordPress 2.0 image handling

There I go again, another rant about WordPress 2.0… But let me start by saying that WordPress is by far the best blogging tool around (and I have tried them all ).
With the introduction of WordPress 2.0 I had high expectations of all the wonderful new features, that now appear to be in need of much more work. There are even many WordPress users that don’t even switch to the 2.0 version because they think it is not worth it.
So what is wrong with the way WordPress 2.0 handles images in posts?

1. Well, let me start by saying that I think the new html editor is the root of all evil and here is why:
   When I upload a new image I have to send it to the post by clicking on the thumbnail of the uploaded image. After doing this, the image appears with a very strange size and I have to switch to html view (which opens in a pop-up!!!) to take away the height and width values that have been added incorrectly.
   Before the release of WP 2.0 I have seen very cool demo’s of the developers where they were resizing the images in the editor, this then looked very cool, but in practice is just plain stupid. You should never manually resize images in the html editor because they will end up looking horribly!
   So could you please remove this unusable feature and just use the default size of the image instead?
2. Images are created as posts of the type ‘attachment’, this is very cool and can be used for nice features such as a photo album with categories and comments. The big problem is that there is no good way to edit the existing images in WP.
   There is a ‘Browse All’ feature that shows you all images in the database, but there is no way to see to which posts these images belong. This means that it is now possible to delete an image that is a ‘child’ of a post. It should be very easy to implement a feature that prevents images to be deleted when they have a parent post in which they are being used.
   Now it is very likely to accidentally delete an image that is used in a post and end up with broken image paths.
3. Less important, but still a bit annoying is the dreadful quality of the generated thumbnails. Using GD it should be possible to create decent looking thumbnails that make things look much better.

Okay, I could go on for hours, but I don’t want to bore you with my complaints, so here go a few recommendations:

1. Replace the horrible html editor that randomly applies image height and width and allows you to resize the image and thereby distorting them completely.
2. In the html editor replace the insert/edit image button for one that connects to the images in the WordPress database. The button that is there now does not make any sense and WP has a completely different way of handling images. (Advanced users know how to make an image tag, this is now just confusing new users).
3. Under the ‘Manage’ tab, create a tab for images on which it is possible to edit the titles and descriptions and to see in which posts a certain image is being used. Only allow images to be deleted from that page (and not from the ‘Browse All’ window) to prevent images from being deleted that are used in posts.
4. Make an ‘options’ page for images in which it is possible to define default image sizes. Uploaded images can then automatically be resized to help unexperienced users not to break their lay-out. Blogger.com for example has three pre-defined image sizes, this is very convenient for the less experienced users.

Unfortunately the image handling of WordPress 2.0 is not the only weak point. In future posts I will comment on some other ‘weak spots’.

I think that 2.0 has been released much to quickly and I am anxiously waiting for the 2.1 version! (and it seems I am not the only one)
Please comment on my post! I really would like to know what you think of this all!