Faster way to put images into a blog post by using Add Media dialog

Question

One of the most time consuming things for me in blogging with Wordpress is adding images to the blog post. For each image, the user needs to click first "Add Media" button. Then, the user waits for the appearance of the "Add Media Dialog". Then he clicks "Media Library" tab in the dialog to see all the images he previously uploaded. Then he waits for the appearance of the "Media Library" form.

So, there are two latencies that waste time:

1. Appearance of the Add Media dialog
2. Appearance of the Media Library form

Every time, these two visual components are the same in the same blog post. So actually, there might be a way to cache these two components once and present them to the user instantly.

I wonder if there is a faster way to put images into Wordpress blog posts where I will be able to specify meta data about the image such as caption, alignment, and size?

Answer 1

Nothing here is a silver bullet, but here are some suggestions:

If you find yourself using your library more than uploading new images, you can make the default tab "Library":

add_filter('_upload_iframe_src', 'change_default_media_tab');
function change_default_media_tab($uri) {
    return $uri.'&tab=library';
}

If you want the default tab to be the uploader, but you want it to load faster, you could always use the HTML uploader, which is not as fancy but might be faster to load. If you switch to using the HTML uploader, WordPress will remember that preference. Also, if you aren't using WP 3.3, and you're still using the flash uploader, updating to 3.3 and having the HTML5 uploader will be a huge improvement for you!

My last suggestion would be to hook into the media_buttons action to create a second new media button that points directly to the gallery tab. If you look at wp-admin/includes/media.php, line 376, function "media_buttons", you'll see how the current one is built. That way you can get rid of the latency on (1) only when you know your image is in the gallery.

Cheers~