Disclaimer: With this thread I just want to kick of some discussion about Media Module improvements and extendability. No real solutions provided yet
The Problem
Media Module not extendable
For a customer project, I need to store license information with the assets and make them editable for the editors. The right place to do this is the Media module. But the module has no extension points. To add one field most of the templates and the controller (so nearly everything) needs to be exchanged.
Tags do not scale
Tags are used by photographers to describe a picture - a picture from DPA eg. may contain around 20 tags. The tags are also used by editors to structure the assets. The tag-sidebar is not capable to display a lot of tags clearly and it flips to the bottom when a few tags are available which makes it even more unusable.
Additional Info
Asset Meta Data Storage
With https://github.com/neos/metadata-contentrepositoryadapter it is possible to store arbitrary asset meta data using the CR and https://github.com/neos/metadata-extractor already extracts meta data from images. That makes the storage part completely flexible as customer-related properties can be added like for every other node.
Goal
The goal is an overhaul of the media module, addressing the problems above. My Idea would be to copy ideas of the content module - especially the inspector concept and lend some ideas from powerful image libraries like Adobe Lightroom. This is a first clumsy photoshop mockup of what I have in mind:
Basically the Detail View / Editing moved to the inspector. A configurable filter bar in the top filters by relevant attributes. The complete Media Module is a drop zone now, the drop zone is removed to gain space for filters and more thumbs.
Technical thoughts / to discuss
My first idea was to exchange the Fluid views with Fusion to make them extensible. Also extension points to the controller would be necessary to load and save the meta data of an image and to extend the search with additionally provided filters and search on all meta data.
Such a rewrite feels doable. The question to discuss is, if the next Media Module should also be build on react and should use the same technologies as the content module, which of course is a way bigger task but would offer much more flexibility and a lot more application-like interface.
I really looking forward to hear your opinions on that topic.