MediaHub 1.10: collections workflow, state persistence, and a better inputfield

A lot of what went into 1.10 came directly from people using MediaHub every day. A suggestion here, a frustration flagged there. Some of it I already had on the list and some of it I hadn't thought about until someone pointed it out. Either way, it's a better release for it.

Drag and drop into Collections

One of the early testers made a simple suggestion: it would be great to drag an image from the library into the Collections panel to assign it. Hard to disagree with that.

As your library grows, organising assets into collections becomes more important. But until now you had to open each asset individually to assign it to a collection. That's fine for a handful of images but it can be tedious for fifty.

Now you can select one image or several, drag them across, and drop onto a collection in the sidebar panel. The library updates immediately. It's a surprisingly natural workflow, partly because ProcessWire already uses drag and drop for reordering pages in the tree, so the pattern isn't unfamiliar to your clients either.

One thing to note: drag and drop assigns to one collection at a time. If you need to assign an asset to several collections in one go, the Collections submenu (below) is the better tool for that. There's no drag and drop support for table rows yet but I'm looking at it.

Assign to multiple collections at once

While testing the drag and drop feature I started thinking about a gap it doesn't fill: what if you want to assign an asset to several collections at once, or remove it from one you added by mistake?

The answer is the new Collections submenu in the tile context menu (the three-dot button on each asset card). There's now a Collections option that opens a second level showing every collection with a checkbox next to it. The asset's current memberships are already checked. Tick a box to add, untick to remove. Each change happens immediately without a page reload. A Done button closes it when you're finished.

I've been using both the drag and drop and the submenu for a few days now and find them a real time saver. Together they make collection management feel like part of the normal flow rather than a separate task you have to go and do.

The Collections sidebar stays put while you scroll

This one came from the same testing session. If you're scrolling down through a long library looking for images to organise, the Collections panel scrolls off the top of the screen. To switch collections you have to scroll back up, click it, then find your place again.

The Collections sidebar is now sticky on desktop. It stays visible at the top of the viewport while the library scrolls beneath it. Small change, noticeable immediately.

Thumbnail size slider in the images field

Honestly, this one should have been there from the start. In the MediaHub field on a page editing form, you now have a size slider to the left of the view toggle buttons. Drag it to make thumbnails smaller for a better overview, or larger if you need to see the images clearly. Your preference is saved per field.

If you've used ProcessWire's native image field, it'll look familiar. It works the same way.

Proportional display in the images field

While we're on the images field: the proportional view mode now actually displays images at their natural proportions. Previously, even in proportional mode, landscape images were constrained into a square card. A wide photo and a tall photo looked like the same shape.

That's fixed. The field now behaves more like the native ProcessWire images field, which is where it should have been.

The library remembers your view preference

A user pointed out that while they liked the different library views, Masonry was their favourite but coming back to the page from other work meant having to select it again every visit. They had to click Masonry again and it was frustrating to have to repeat this every time.

Your chosen view (Grid, Masonry, or Table) is now saved and restored automatically. Same for the Details toggle and the Collections sidebar state. They persist across page reloads, across sessions, and even if you log out and back in.

Worth mentioning: the preference is applied before the page paints, not after. There's no flash of the wrong view loading first and then switching. It just opens in the right state.

Click anywhere in a table row to select it

In Table view, selecting a row used to mean hitting the small checkbox precisely. Click anywhere else in the row and nothing happened. A power user pointed out this was annoying, and they were right.

Now clicking anywhere in a row selects it. The Title column still links to the asset detail page as before.

Logging is off by default

MediaHub has always written a log file and on active sites, and especially during imports, that file grew quickly and added noise to the ProcessWire log viewer. Several people mentioned it as unexpected in a production environment.

Logging is now off by default. You can turn it on in the module configuration if you need it, for example when tracking down a problem. There's also a Clear Logs button in the same section so you can reset the file without going to the filesystem.

A few other things

There are some CSS improvements to the library and related pages: better table layout on narrow viewports, corrected column colours, and the Collections panel UI has been tightened up.

There's also a bug fix for a tag input issue where [object Object] could appear in the tag field before saving. A small but visually alarming one to encounter.

Download

MediaHub 1.10 is available from the downloads page. The full list of changes is in the changelog.