WordPress 2.0: Image Uploading Broken

I use WordPress as my blogging software, and I recently upgraded to the new version 2.0.

The new version is excellent in most ways, wonderful for integrated comment spam blocking, it is driving me nuts with its silly image uploading problems.

I format my own images in Photoshop and (in the old version of WordPress) customized the image upload page’s handling so that it returned a bunch of HTML that incorporated image placement and bordering code.

Well, WP 2.0 has integrated image uploading right into the blog posting page. Good idea – it looks like this, right under the post entry form:

The problem comes in after you upload a file. You get a little preview, and when you click on it, a list of options:

All well and good – until you actually start to use them.

Using thumbnail, if you leave it, would suggest that WP would stick a thumbnail image into your post, which would be clickable if someone wanted to see it full-size. Nice feature – if you want it.

When you deselect it, like this:

You would think that the result would be a full-size image dumped into your page when you, immediately thereafter, click “Send to editor.” But you’d be wrong.

Instead, WordPress just sends a thumbnail version to your post … so if you save and publish, you’ll get this wonderful result:

Not cool. Not cool at all. While you’ve just told your software to use the original, it’s disobeying you and, instead, displaying a thumbnail version.

In fact, it’s doing precisely opposite what you asked it to do.

Of course, it’s not actually creating a thumbnail. That would require actually editing the image and rely on a variety of other software being installed on your server. Instead, WordPress is simply setting the height and width properties in the HTML to some fraction of the actual image height and width.

So it’s

1) disobeying your direct instructions
2) not saving you any bandwidth at all
3) making your blog look awful, or
4) forcing you to do more work to get it right

WordPress development people, Matt, whoever: please fix this!

. . .
. . .

Of course, a variety of people around the web have already found this out … and there’s a discussion about it on the WordPress support forums, as well as here, and Techcrunch has a few notes on it as well. Also see this post of a set of general gotchas with WordPress 2.0.

[ update Jan. 13 ]

I’ve hacked WordPress’s file inline-uploading.php to do what I want. I want it to upload files, to stick them in the editor, and not do any resizing.

(Oh, and btw, I want it to automatically center them, and apply my pic CSS styling to them, which gives them a little grey border. But that’s incidental.)

To accomplish what I did, grab a copy of inline-uploading.php out of the wp-admin directory. After making a backup copy, delete lines 236-247, and replace with this code:

<br /> $script .= “aa[{$ID}] = ”;<br /> ab[{$ID}] = ‘<a class=\"imagelink\" href=\"{$image['guid']}\" onclick=\"doPopup({$ID});return false;\" title=\"{$title}\">‘;<br /> imga[{$ID}] = ‘<img id=\"image{$ID}\" src=\"$src\" alt=\"{$title}\" $height_width />‘;<br /> imgb[{$ID}] = ‘<img id=\"image{$ID}\" src=\"{$image['guid']}\" alt=\"{$title}\" $height_width />‘;<br /> “;<br /> $html .= “</p> <div id='target{$ID}' class='attwrap left'> <div id='div{$ID}' class='imagewrap' onclick=\"doPopup({$ID});\"> <div align=\"center\"><img id=\"image{$ID}\" src=\"$src\" alt=\"{$title}\" class =\"pic\" $height_width /></div> </div> <p>{$noscript} </p></div> <p>“;<br />

(Then, if you wish, just strip out my custom additions. They are the “div align = center”, the closing div tag, and the “class = pic” chunk.)

C’ing My A
Use at your own risk, your mileage may vary, make a backup first, and note: this will kill the thumbnail generation …. which is exactly what I want it to do, but I’m not sure if that’s your desire as well!