Galleries are fundamentally broken

I think I can see the potential in the blocks. But I also see plenty of things that really get in the way of efficiently writing and editing.

The way I use the editor to write and update posts always involves switching between the “Visual” and the “Text” mode – and it is particularly nice how clean and tidy the “Text” in the Classic Editor looks. The new features in Gutenberg bring so much complexity and clutter to some aspects of my daily workflow that it is simply not effective to use Gutenberg.

My main concern is the [gallery] shortcode. In the Classic Editor in Text mode, it is SO easy to update a gallery after uploading an image and editing it by simply copying & pasting the ID of the image into the list of ids in the gallery shortcode:

[gallery type="thumbnails" columns="1" size="large" ids="946,947,948,949,950,951,952,953,954,955,956,957,958,959,960,961,962"]

By comparison, the HTML view in Gutenberg is an insane mess and the option to simply paste a media ID is gone:

<ul class="wp-block-gallery columns-1 is-cropped"><li class="blocks-gallery-item"><figure><img src="https://shuwenwu.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Palomar-8345.jpg" alt="" data-id="946" class="wp-image-946"/></figure></li><li class="blocks-gallery-item"><figure><img src="https://shuwenwu.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Palomar-8358.jpg" alt="" data-id="947" class="wp-image-947"/></figure></li><li class="blocks-gallery-item"><figure><img src="https://shuwenwu.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Palomar-8360.jpg" alt="" data-id="948" class="wp-image-948"/></figure></li><li class="blocks-gallery-item"><figure><img src="https://shuwenwu.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Palomar-8361.jpg" alt="" data-id="949" class="wp-image-949"/></figure></li><li class="blocks-gallery-item"><figure><img src="https://shuwenwu.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Palomar-8379.jpg" alt="" data-id="950" class="wp-image-950"/></figure></li><li class="blocks-gallery-item"><figure><img src="https://shuwenwu.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Palomar-8387.jpg" alt="" data-id="951" class="wp-image-951"/></figure></li><li class="blocks-gallery-item"><figure><img src="https://shuwenwu.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Palomar-8389.jpg" alt="" data-id="952" class="wp-image-952"/></figure></li><li class="blocks-gallery-item"><figure><img src="https://shuwenwu.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Palomar-8392.jpg" alt="" data-id="953" class="wp-image-953"/></figure></li><li class="blocks-gallery-item"><figure><img src="https://shuwenwu.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Palomar-8396.jpg" alt="" data-id="954" class="wp-image-954"/></figure></li><li class="blocks-gallery-item"><figure><img src="https://shuwenwu.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Palomar-8398.jpg" alt="" data-id="955" class="wp-image-955"/></figure></li><li class="blocks-gallery-item"><figure><img src="https://shuwenwu.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Palomar-8402.jpg" alt="" data-id="956" class="wp-image-956"/></figure></li><li class="blocks-gallery-item"><figure><img src="https://shuwenwu.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Palomar-8409.jpg" alt="" data-id="957" class="wp-image-957"/></figure></li><li class="blocks-gallery-item"><figure><img src="https://shuwenwu.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Palomar-8412.jpg" alt="" data-id="958" class="wp-image-958"/></figure></li><li class="blocks-gallery-item"><figure><img src="https://shuwenwu.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Palomar-8417.jpg" alt="" data-id="959" class="wp-image-959"/></figure></li><li class="blocks-gallery-item"><figure><img src="https://shuwenwu.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Palomar-8422.jpg" alt="" data-id="960" class="wp-image-960"/></figure></li><li class="blocks-gallery-item"><figure><img src="https://shuwenwu.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Palomar-8431.jpg" alt="" data-id="961" class="wp-image-961"/></figure></li><li class="blocks-gallery-item"><figure><img src="https://shuwenwu.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Palomar-8436.jpg" alt="" data-id="962" class="wp-image-962"/></figure></li></ul>

What’s worse, there aren’t even any options to EDIT the gallery in Gutenberg. All that can be done is rearranging the images. No columns option, no layout option… and this is in version 3.5 of Gutenberg?!

At the very least, Gutenberg should be untied from WordPress 5.0 for now to take the pressure out of it. I’m hesitant to even save one single post created with Gutenberg because there’s no easy way back (as far as I can see).

I work with galleries multiple times per day on a number of photography related websites, and Gutenberg turns my workflow into a click-orgy, or plainly breaks it.

• This topic was modified 6 years, 3 months ago by Alexander S. Kunz.
• This topic was modified 6 years, 3 months ago by Alexander S. Kunz.
• This topic was modified 6 years, 3 months ago by Jan Dembowski. Reason: Removed links
• This topic was modified 6 years, 3 months ago by Alexander S. Kunz. Reason: replaced links to screenshots with code