Name of images pasted in CKEditor

Development
#1

Hello all,

When adding an image in a page, if an attachment with a similar name already exists, the attachment is replaced by the new image (with an version increment).
But, for images pasted in CKEditor, the user does not control the image name.
The image name is a localized and browser dependent constant (e.g., image.png on Chrome, or grafik.png in a German Firefox).
Consequently, if a user paste several images to the same document, the last one will override the previous one (or if an image.png image already exists).

The current approach to address this issue is to check if the image is named image.png and to replace it with ${TIMESTAMP}-${RANDOM}.png.
But, as explained above, this is not accurate as for German Firefox, the file name is grafik.png.

You can see the Draft PR where I propose an approach to more accurately identify if an image originates from a paste operation (using beforePaste/afterPaste event listeners).

This PR is also proposing a behavioral change. The pasted filename is now transformed to ${FILENAME}-${TIMESTAMP}-${RANDOM}.png where FILENAME is the original name of the pasted file (e.g, image or grafik).

This change is not technically required and we could keep using the ${TIMESTAMP}-${RANDOM}.png pattern, but I feel like having the original filename could make for better attachments names.

So the question is, WDYT of changing the filename pattern:

  • in 15.x?
  • in 14.10.x?
5 Likes
#2

This is not always true. It depends very much on the tool used to copy the image. Sometimes you do have a proper image file name. The question is more if we agree to have a different behaviour on paste versus drop / upload:

  • drop / upload: overwrite existing images / attachments, if the file name matches
  • paste: never overwrite existing images / attachments

I’m not fully convinced on my side but I don’t have a better solution and the current approach is clearly not good enough as we had many complains from users. So +1 to try this out.

Thanks,
Marius

#3

I have another option in mind. At paste time, prompt the user to set a filename manually.
Either all the time, or by checking first if the new file name conflicts with an existing attachment.
We could check for the conflict on the beforePaste event, and either change the name automatically (e.g., with an incremental suffix), or open a prompt so that the user could manually edit the name.
I’m note fully sure of how strong it would be regarding:

  • the temporary attachment store (which would need to be checked in case of multiple paste in the same edit session)
  • a document edited by several users at the same time, with several uploading images with the same name

Note that this approach could even be generalize to all ways to upload attachments, since conflicts can also occur there too.

#4

You’d probably need to perform the check for both existing attachments and attachments in the temporary store, but that should be doable I think.

It would be a standard edition conflict, but right now I’m not sure we’re giving much options for fixing those in case of uploads. Could be interesting to check actually.

+0 for this

IMO we’d need to have some UI in the editor to manipulate the added attachments in current editing session, e.g. to also allow canceling an attachment before saving (see: Loading...). So I’d go for the option you suggested with an automatic incremental suffix, and then provide in this future UI the capability to rename the attachments before actually performing the save.

#5

I’ve applied Loading... and kept the legacy behavior for now.