Submissions shouldn't require titles

[Jef van Schendel]

When submitting an image, it's currently necessary to fill in the title field or the user will get a "Field must be between 1 and 500 characters long." notice.

However, a title should not be required when submitting. For instance, when submitting a large amount of images the user might not want to think of and type in titles for every single one. We should leave it up to the user to determine whether titles are needed or not, instead of blocking the submission process.

[Sebastian Spaeth]

I believe flickr fills in the filename as title if the title is left empty. In some cases that makes sense, but in most cases it's completely useless. Not sure what we want to do here (personally, I think pics without title are fine).

[Aaron Williamson]

Submitted a merge request to implement Flickr-like functionality as Sebastian suggests: https://gitorious.org/mediagoblin/mediagoblin/merge_requests/7

[Aaron Williamson]

Upon further consideration, defaulting to the filename might be the wrong solution for the current process. Flickr's upload process is two-part: 1) upload image, 2) fill in details. Title defaults to filename in step 2's form. With a one-step upload-and-describe process, defaulting empty titles to the filename means users don't have the chance to leave the title empty unless they go back and edit the image data. So maybe blank titles should just remain blank for now.

Alternatively, or in conjunction, we could implement the two-step upload process. I think this makes a lot of sense, particularly when you're uploading many images (possibly via an API). Are there design reasons not to use a two-step process?

[Jef van Schendel]

Aaron Williamson wrote:

Are there design reasons not to use a two-step process?

I'm not sure, this is definitely something I'll have to think about. You know what, I'll close this ticket and continue in a the ticket I've just created here:

http://bugs.foocorp.net/issues/321

I think the two-step process sounds good, as does the no-title-required thing. It's important that we can distinguish uploaded images. Even if there's no title, we can rely on the images themselves to be visually different. And if they're not, the user will be able to use the optional title field.

[Aaron Williamson]

0001-On-image-submission-do-not-require-title.-If-none-en.patch

[Aaron Williamson]

For posterity/completeness, I'm attaching the actual patch as specified in the hacking guide.

[Christopher Allan Webber]

Looks good, merged. Thanks!

[Will Kahn-Greene]

The original url for this bug was ​http://bugs.foocorp.net/issues/318 .