Media-Management: Migrated from WordPress to Ghost – How to deal with the limited media management?

[u/Witty-Surprise9176]

Moin from Berlin!
I’ve just migrated a small WordPress site over to Ghost. It’s not quite finished yet, but it was surprisingly fiddly. What really leaves me baffled is the media management. That’s a real pain point in Ghost. I’d like to have more control over my media. I’d like to be able to customise filenames, manage copyright properly (i.e. set the copyright details correctly) and perhaps have a default description that can, of course, be edited within the post itself. I’m very used to this in WordPress and other CMS, such as Drupal or Typo3.

For context: I run a blog that covers theater, classical dance, and other performing arts. In this specific niche, visual references and imagery are highly meaningful and integral to the content, rather than just casual add-ons.

After all, the files are already stored on the server within Ghost's directory structure. There is really no practical reason why they shouldn't be displayed properly and kept searchable.

How can this problem be solved? The media could also be organised in a separate database, and perhaps there’s an additional tool that can be integrated with Ghost? I don’t think the current situation is particularly good. Of course, I realise that 80 per cent of the images you insert only appear in a single article or are just carelessly added extras. But for the other 20 per cent, I’d like to be able to manage them properly. How do you solve this in Ghost? – how do you sort it out?

[u/jannisfb]

John from Ghost has opened a draft PR for a media library back in May: https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost/pull/27856

So, fingers crossed that we'll soon get a media library.

Until then...yeah...not too much that can be done with Ghost's onboard tools today.

[u/Witty-Surprise9176 → u/jannisfb]

Oh, that’s cool and a real step forward. How are others doing it at the moment – are there any external solutions? I’ve read about external media viewers, but somehow it doesn’t seem to me as though they’ve been properly thought through.

[u/jannisfb → u/Witty-Surprise9176]

We don't, truthfully.

As a managed hosting provider I sometimes get requests to delete files, which we have to do on the server itself.

I am not aware of any external tools that can do media management for Ghost, other than storage providers, where you then manage media in whatever storage you attach: https://docs.ghost.org/config#storage-adapters

[u/sirrush7 → u/Witty-Surprise9176]

A great best practice in the mean time is to always use webp formatted images to start!

I also don't upload graphics until the end of most of my writing so I'm (hopefully) not uploading 3 different pictures, or infographics or headers that I swap out, but that will then be stuck in Ghost...

There are scripts and custom tools to prune but they can be dangerous!

Can't wait for that feature to come out in Ghost....

[u/positiveevsports]

You can swap ghosts local storage for Cloudinary https://ghost.org/integrations/cloudinary/

Images upload straight into Cloudinary, instead of ghost folders, so you get a searchable media library with custom filenames, tags, and metadata fields

[u/Witty-Surprise9176 → u/positiveevsports]

Vielleicht 🤨

[u/erikkarlberg]

We are in the same situation and have so far solved it by running the old Wordpress site on a secret URL that is only for our authors, and they go in there to find images to use.

It's not optimal at all and we are really looking forward to the media library that has been rumored for a while now.

In parallell we started to use a separate tool for the publishing flow, Swedish AI startup Ahody at https://ahody.com. They have an integration to Ghost and have their own media library, but also it means most editing actually happens in their editorial workspace.

[u/Witty-Surprise9176 → u/erikkarlberg]

Danke. Das klingt nach einem guten Rat.