Enhancement: let users sort their files in media dashboard

[LuiseFreese]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
I don't want to go over several pages of media in order to find the image I want to insert.

Describe the solution you'd like
let me (and other users) sort their files, from A-Z, new to old and/or implement search to search for a specific image

Describe alternatives you've considered
alternative is to manually insert the link and not previewing the image in the dashboard

Additional context

[estruyf]

Thanks @LuiseFreese! It makes a lot of sense to have this functionality added to the media dashboard!

[estruyf]

@LuiseFreese first implementation of the sorting for the media dashboard is completed. At the moment, only sorting based on the filename is supported.

Sorting by the creation/modified date is a bit tricky, as that can lead to performance issues depending on the number of files. Currently, the dashboard shows batches of 16 files, if we want to enable this type of sorting. The statistics of all files need to be fetched first before sorting can be accomplished.

[estruyf]

Feel free to test out the latest beta which has the filename sorting in place.

[zivbk1]

I wonder if some kind of library caching option could be available. To make a pass through all the files and then store some data about them all in the media db file. Then when adding or deleting files you update the DB file as part of the operation, or run a sync manually or in the background. This way you are sorting/listing the data in the file and not requiring file read operations each time you open or sort the library.

[estruyf]

@zivbk1 I have been thinking about that as well. Although I'm not a fan of syncing. Most of the time, it causes issues but thinking about a better and more robust solution.

Question to @LuiseFreese and @zivbk1. What do your asset folders look like? Is it one folder with all the files? Or multiple folders to structure the content?

If it is the last, it might less be an issue, as fewer files will be retrieved all at once than if you have all files in the root folder.

[zivbk1]

I typically have a single 'uploads' folder under my 'static' folder in Hugo where I put all the images that are used in content and layouts. I don't tend to put any subfolders inside of it.
I do have some sites where all of my media assets (images, videos, binary files (PDF, ZIP, XLSX, etc.)) are in different folders, but the images folder doesn't have any subdirectories. These assets are not stored in my git repo. I put them in an S3 bucket and use CloudFront to expose the bucket to the world at a custom subdomain, like files.mydomain.com. The only downside to this is most editors can't just insert a path reference. In this case, I only ask the editors to use the asset filename in the content source or frontmatter parameter and I use shortcodes, partials, render hooks, etc. to use the correct URL to the asset when it is rendered to the browser. Having an integration to upload and list files in an S3 bucket would be awesome in the FM UI, because I could do this same trick with all my sites and get binaries out of my repo as much as possible.

[estruyf]

Those are good insights @zivbk1! For the media snippet, would it help for you that there is also a {filename} token besides the: mediaUrl, caption, and alt?

[zivbk1]

Yes, that would help with the DAM use case, where the files live outside of the repo.

[LuiseFreese]

I have an images folder in my static folder for my Hugo site.. no subfolders :-)

[estruyf]

New beta version with support for macOS and Linux date sorting. The next step is to work on support for Windows.

[LuiseFreese]

So it could already work on WSL2?