Why I Don’t Like the New WP Media Manager

Bloggers over on WordPress.com have had the new Media Manager for a while, then they decided to put it into the downloadable client which I use for Mental Gamers, WordPress 3.5, I reverted back to 3.4.2 since 3.5 didn’t seem to work properly in the backend (admin) and also because I noticed that the new Media Manager had been included.

Let’s take a look at why I don’t like it…

A fine example is how it’s just handled entering the above image into this post, without me realising, it entered all four images into the post when I thought just one was selected.

This means I now have to ‘edit’ the images to enter their title and alt values for the sake of SEO, instead of just entering them when I want to, so that I can make sure I do it the way I want to.

As you can also see, it’s just bland, not like how it was before when it would show recent uploads, you’re forced to click a link to show them.

Once you click to see your Library, you can choose which image you want to use either in the post or as a featured image. So you click on the image and the metadata shows up on the right-hand side.

Selecting the size of the image seems a bit pointless too, the available sizes don’t correlate with the available width of the content frame of your blog. With the old Media Manager, you could just put something in the title attribute, then highlight and drag that same text into the alt attribute box, but that’s not the case with the new Media Manager…

You can’t just drag the text down due to it recognising something is being dragged and the whole screen goes blue. It thinks you’re dragging images to upload, not just text from one box to another and that has to be the most annoying part about it.

To put text in both the title and alt boxes, you either have to copy and paste or type it out twice. Now I don’t know about you, I find that a little time-consuming compared to before, I could upload and do the necessities within a minute, now it’s at least twice that.

A minor quibble you may say, but it’s an inconvenience and reduces the pleasure of blogging.

The code stays relatively the same until you realise it’s missed out the title attribute you were sure that you had entered upon uploading the image.

I’m just not a fan of the new Media Manager and that’s why I went back to WordPress 3.4.2 for my website, the new one isn’t very user-friendly at all, they’ve somehow managed to make what was so good about WordPress, worse.