Comments on: Dear Wordpress, it’s just one f**king image

By: Abi Raja

Abi Raja — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 06:21:15 +0000

As far as I know, 2.9 only adds support for a few video sites (and other oEmbed photo sites).

And yeah, I do find it ridiculous that they force the user to type a title, but not the alt text (I made the mistake of confusing the two in my post).

By: Dave Holowiski

Dave Holowiski — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 23:28:29 +0000

As Jeff said, you need to check out 2.9. It’s not a slam dunk, but if the site the picture is hosted at supports oembed, you can just drop the URL in to your post and WordPress will magically turn it into a picture (or video) Unfortunately it looks like right now dropbox doesn’t support oembed but i bet it will soon. You can see a list of the sites this currently works with over at wordpress.org: http://codex.wordpress.org/Embeds

By: Phillip OHara

Phillip OHara — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 12:05:37 +0000

I found this article amusing. I run a blog based off of wordpress at http://hordereview.com (come by and check it out of course 8)). I wish I would have learned a better CMS like Joomla or Drupal because Word Press seems to have problems like the picture editing you mentioned above. Or the vast array of unkept plugins that needs to be wiped from the database. I particularly am ok witht he picture editing I just make my changes and move on. However the addon support is horrible, I understand it is opensource and up to the editor, but when it is clearly not being maintained it should be wiped from the database. I could do an entire Word Press fail blog, but at the same time I am exptremely happy that WordPress is there from me to use free of charge.

By: Gijs

Gijs — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 10:42:47 +0000

@Elroy: I was talking about the alt attribute, not the title. A filename just isn't an acceptable alternative text for an image, nor does it usually include one. The screenshots on this page are great examples (eg. "Picture 160"). Besides, almost all assistive technology will offer you the filename as "information" if you don't provide an alt attribute, so 'manually' providing the filename as alternative text just adds information the AT doesn't know is fake instead of saying "I didn't bother describing this image" (which is what omitting it would imply).

I have no idea why WP requires you to add a title attribute.

My preferred UI would just detect that you paste in a URL in the field, turn it into a link, have UI to insert the image/video/applet the link points to into the content directly (I want to be able to link to images without having them automatically showing up in my blogpost), and automatically ask for an alt attribute / alternative content in a dialog (real or website-faked, don't really care) if the user chooses to change the link into an actual insertion of content, with a "more" button to get you all the other fuss that WP currently shows.

By: Elroy

Elroy — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 19:18:56 +0000

@Gijs, don’t think its unreasonable to “figure” out the title from the image name. If nothing else works, you could always use the image name as is. Granted, it may not make sense, but it will save at least one step in this oh-so-tedious process.

By: seifsallam

seifsallam — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 07:10:34 +0000

there is a theme in Wordpress that have a similar functionality to Tumblr like writing Status, Blog, Quote, and Link.

but i agree that uploading images using Wordpress is very annoying, it needs to be more easy

By: smo

smo — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 22:15:27 +0000

ok, you proved to the world you were able to post images on you wordpress blog ?! wow ! genius ! it was hard though. :P

By: Jeff Walden

Jeff Walden — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 18:56:43 +0000

You’re behind the times; the recently-released 2.9 adds video insertion by inserting the URL. I think it might do the same for images, but I’m not sure.

By: Gijs

Gijs — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 18:34:51 +0000

Usable alt text is in 99.99% not deducable from image names. Digital cameras name files numerically (an alt text of "DSC1629" is clearly not very useful), and screenshots tend to not have great names, either: "Picture 42" or "Screen shot 2009-12-24 23:59", depending on Mac OS version, and if people get to do it themselves, they usually don't choose well either.

Also, note that as far as I can tell from the screenshots you posted, Wordpress uses the title for the, well, title, and the "Caption" as alt text. That's kind of what it says underneath the field. Oddly enough, alt text isn't required by WP. And (some of?) your images here (indeed?) have an empty alt text, which is incorrect as the images do not have descriptive text elsewhere, and a useless title text.