Improve adding media to categories

[GDR!]

So I uploaded some photos from an event, and wanted to add them all to a collection.

The current work flow is as following:

1. Create collection
2. Upload pictures
3. Go to media processing panel
4. Click on a title of photo
5. Assign to collection
6. Save
7. GOTO 4

It's very tedious. I'm not an UI expert, but I see two potential solutions:

1. When clicking Add Media while in a collection, add media to this collection by default
2. In the Add Media screen, add a dropdown with list of categories

[user-A]

Please refer the workflow at a wordpress instance to create a gallery, this is very nice:

• upload all files at once
• rearange them and at some add custom properties (that differ from the collection defaults)
• done!

[jan]

Totally agree here, especially on:

In the Add Media screen, add a dropdown with list of categories

And in the collection view, there should be a function to add media to this collection as well.

[anongoblin]

see https://issues.mediagoblin.org/ticket/990 too

[tofay]

Hi,
I've just setup a mediagoblin instance, and my wife was annoyed by this. I'm happy to implement a simple collection dropdown for the add media page (I'll attach a basic patch), which I think would be useful independent of other bulk uploading solutions.

What's the next step here? If this ticket gets accepted, and the patch is along the right lines then I can write tests and code to take care of edge cases, i.e the collection already contains media of the same title.

[Christopher Allan Webber]

Heya tofay! I think this patch is on the right track, but it doesn't seem to work. I tried running it and got the following error:

File '/home/cwebber/devel/mediagoblin/mediagoblin/submit/views.py', line 80 in submit_start
  "add", media, request.user, target=collection)
NameError: global name 'collection' is not defined

And indeed, collection is not defined! Could you fix that issue?

Additionally, I think it would be ideal if the collections dropdown was shown *if* the user has collections to add it to. If not, maybe we should leave it out. Would you be interested in adding that enhancement?

Tests and edge cases fixes would be good to handle as well.

By the way, nice job adding the "add to collection activity"! That would have been easy to miss! :)

[Christopher Allan Webber]

Oh yes, and if you submit another patch, could you use git format-patch? It will make merging your patch much easier and preserve attribution information better.

[tofay]

w.r.t only showning the dropdown if the user has collections, yes I'll do that (it was the only edge case I could think of anyway!)

[tofay]

Changes are:
mediagoblin/submit/forms.py - add the collection dropdown field
mediagoblin/submit/views.py - remove the collection dropdown if the user has no collections. If a collection was chosen then add the media to the collection
mediagoblin/tests/test_submission.py - test that the submit form works with/without the user having/specifying collections.

[tofay]

Second patch adds a test to check that the activity was created. Sorry for submitting it as two patches/thanks for your patience (I'm pretty new to git)!

[Christopher Allan Webber]

Great work on this, tofay! I merged and pushed it. It's definitely a big improvement :)

Btw, how would you prefer to be attributed in the AUTHORS file? Just tom, or tofay, or something longer? Thanks!

[tofay]

Glad that I can help as I'm really liking mediagoblin. Re AUTHORS file: "Tom Fay"

[Christopher Allan Webber]

Got it! And thanks again!