[discussion] DrupalCon Barcelona media architecture

Any findings/outcomes?

@tonypaulbarker gave us an overview of the media management track in Starshot including #3476350: Proposal for Media Management in early versions of Drupal CMS and some future plans that are not yet documented on drupal.org but that should be written up soon.

There is a desire to extend the media library with some basic image editing tools - competitors have automatic background removal, for example - and we explained that this could probably be built in contrib with little to no involvement from core.

We also spent some time discussing the long standing issues with usage counting in core and #3364744: Add a reliable entity-usage system to core which may need to be solved in the long run if media management in Drupal CMS is to be successful.

There was another attendee whose name I have forgotten - apologies, if someone else can credit them please do so, and if anyone wants to flesh out any other topics we discussed please feel free to add that too.

There was a short discussion about providing an upload-only widget for media instead of the library widget, I mentioned that a contrib module for this already exists (not much usage but maintained by @plach who's a core maintainer). https://www.drupal.org/project/media_widget

We didn't discuss whether that widget should live in core or not, I think it's the sort of thing that could - it would help with fully replacing some file field use cases and would be a small amount of code to maintain.

Please let's also credit gábor-hojtsy for instigating and organising the discussion and thanks to @pameeela too for facilitating.

Thank you again to everyone for their guidance.

To add that we discussed possible approaches to creating instances / derivatives / copies / clones of media entities or media assets so that the same asset can be transformed in different ways in different places.

We think that for image manipulation tools a similar approach to experience builder, using React, may be taken. We expect that improvements to any such tools will be contrib.

The action points for me are:

1. Publish the discovery to date to a Drupal CMS issue
2. Outline the vision and long term objectives and publish to a Drupal CMS issue
3. Identify related issues in the issue queues that we would like to try to resolve to achieve success
4. Evaluate approaches
5. Make people aware as early as possible of modules and features we might need even if we are not sure we will need them so that we can make better choices

To add that we discussed possible approaches to creating instances / derivatives / copies / clones of media entities or media assets so that the same asset can be transformed in different ways in different places.

One aspect of the discussion has also been, that neither clones not copies of media entities may be required if the various transformed versions of files can be derived by e.g. image styles. For the example of an image cut-out, that process could be an image style plugin as well, which can be applied together with other image style plugins on an existing media entity without having to clone that.

Thanks @jurgenhaas we did discuss image styles and also their limitations. I won’t expand on that here, as I will be covering that in some depth in action points 2 and 4.