V8: Allow varying culture for media types

[vonbarnekowa]

The new feature for varying the culture for document types is great! Would it be possible to add this feature for media types?

My use case:

We added a text box to the image document type for the copyright. The thing is that the copyright can vary from one language to another.

[pralthom]

Hi,

We have the same requirement as we need to have different cultures for the medias.
It would be great if you can add this in a future release.

Thanks

[nul800sebastiaan]

Hi! We understand the feature request and have the same wish. This is a longer-term project which we can't work on immediately.

I've put this on the "idea" list for inspiration when we pick up work on the media library in the future.

[tom-ingeniuus]

I'd like to add that this would be very useful for adding variant descriptions to be used as alt attributes for images for accessibility purposes

[ronaldbarendse]

We've used Vorto properties on media in V7 to add alternate texts, so not having culture variant media types and no other alternative (Vorto isn't compatible with V8 and probably won't ever) is a major issue 😢

Adding the alternate texts within the content as additional property isn't always possible (e.g. when picking multiple images or a folder), makes editing unintuative (no image, but filled text; changing the image doesn't update/reset the text, etc.) and would also mean the text needs to be entered every time it's picked.

I would seriously consider adding this feature to the next minor (8.2.0), most infrastructure already seems in place...

[ronaldbarendse]

As a temporary workaround, I'm now just adding a property per culture to the media type, e.g. alternateText_nl and alternateText_fr (same format as Examine adds culture variant fields to the index). To make accessing the specific values a little easier (and hide this workaround to the front-end), the following custom Models Builder class/extension method can be added:

using Umbraco.Core.Composing;
using Umbraco.ModelsBuilder;
using Umbraco.Web;

[IgnorePropertyType("alternateText_nl")]
[IgnorePropertyType("alternateText_fr")]
public partial class Image
{
	public string AlternateText => this.AlternateText();
}

public static partial class ImageExtensions
{
	public static string AlternateText(this Image image, string culture = null)
	{
		var alias = "alternateText";
		if (culture == null)
		{
			culture = Current.VariationContextAccessor?.VariationContext?.Culture;
		}
		if (culture != null)
		{
			alias += "_" + culture;
		}

		return image.Value<string>(alias);
	}
}

[jvtroyen]

Need this feature for the same reason (Alternate text in multiple languages).
Ronalds workaround works for 2 or 3 languages, but we're supporting 15 and it gets ugly in the backend :-)

[Matthew-Wise]

I'd also like to add a +1 for having the alternative text field on the image media type to be added by default.

[sotirisf]

+1 from me for this. We currently either use nested content (with all its drawbacks like having to select images one by one and having to do that for each language) or a variation of @ronaldbarendse 's solution above.

[enkelmedia]

I wanted to add to this use case as well, in the context of media I guess that most of the time it's something like alt-text that is different depending on culture - would probably not make sense to have the umbracoFile vary by culture =D

In this case maybe the UI could be different? Then the design from Vorto would make a lot of sense ie for editing a alt-text.

Is this feature actively considered for the backlog?

[andersbrohall]

Still open :/
Im thinking this would be something that HQ should prioritise. I could argue that multi-language-alt-texts (as an example mentioned above) would be good in terms of accessibility. Or rather, the lack of multi-language-alt-texts would be really bad on a multi-language site.

Is there any way that HQ could assign it to someone? That said, I would love to help, but my skills are more front-end oriented.

[nul800sebastiaan]

Unfortunately we don't encourage people to help on it since we don't know exactly what direction we want to go with this either.

It's on the list, but not on the roadmap so at the moment we are not actively looking at this request. In the future we might be able to add this and related items to the roadmap but I have no news around timing on that.

[umbrabot]

Hi there @vonbarnekowa,

Just wanted to let you know that we noticed that this issue got a bit stale and we haven't been able to get to this idea. We will close this idea for now, as we haven't been able to prioritize it yet.

Once we get time to work on ideas that are in this category we'll review and update existing issues like this one to let you know we're working on it.

Thanks, from your friendly Umbraco GitHub bot 🤖 🙂

[andersbrohall]

Any news on the 'direction' @nul800sebastiaan ?
That said, it's more of an issue with v9/10 than v8 :)

[nul800sebastiaan]

Nope, sorry! :-)

Not on the roadmap yet - https://umbraco.com/products/roadmap/

[cryothic]

Almost a year later. I love U10 (will skip 11 for it's shorter support).
But still nothing on the roadmap?

[dhymik]

I need this too. Every multi lingual website will have this need. I would love to see this soon @nul800sebastiaan

[sniffdk]

Are we there yet? 😅

[cryothic]

@sniffdk Looks like it isn't even on the roadmap yet.
This sucks, because I have to use BlockLists to add images to my gallery with multi-lingual descriptions.

[sniffdk]

Yeah, definitely a bummer, just wanted to jump it, as it's still a very relevant use case.

[andersbrohall]

Still nothing?
I'm amazed that this still hasn't been picked up.
Claiming to prioritise accessibility, but without the ability to create localised alt-texts. Sends a signal, don't you think?

[simonbusborg]

Bump for visibility, and gets my upvote.

[ravimotha42]

Unfortunately we don't encourage people to help on it since we don't know exactly what direction we want to go with this either.

It's on the list, but not on the roadmap so at the moment we are not actively looking at this request. In the future we might be able to add this and related items to the roadmap but I have no news around timing on that.

Can I ask what would get it added to the list.. ie. Is there an approved way to make you aware this is an issue worth taking on board.

Or is this a feature we could develop, with hq blessing which then could be swallowed by the core