[wp-hackers] Attaching photos to multiple posts

[William Davis]

On uploading it again: That's a lot of extra work (finding the image,  
uploading it, editing the cutline and crop, etc.) that a lot of  
newsrooms don't have.

Jane: On choosing it from the media library: You can't select a photo  
from the media library that's attached to another post except to embed  
it. As mentioned below, we don't embed images.

Otto: I mentioned postmeta and taxonomies earlier. Two reasons I  
rejected these were that oftentimes we want to edit the caption  
between two different use cases (for example, a photo of our governor  
on one story might have a full description of what he's doing, while  
the other might just simply state his name and use the photo for  
illustrative purposes; and that we would want to order the photos as  
well, which can certainly be done with postmeta and taxonomies but not  
as easily as, for example, defining menu_order.

The problem is as follows: For our purposes (and I understand this  
probably isn't a core feature) we need an easy way to attach file  
photos to posts (for example, on many continuing stories we'll use the  
same photo three, four, five times). As I mentioned already, uploading  
it multiple times is rather cumbersome.

Thanks for your thoughts thus far already.
Will

> Okay, that's great, but I'm not seeing why you can't just upload the
> image again to attach it to another post? What's the issue with that?
> Disk space?
>
> What I mean is, what exactly would attaching an "attachment" to more
> than one post really enable you to do? Because there's probably a
> better way to do it than using attachments at all, in that case. Off
> the top of my head, provide a selection mechanism that saves
> "attached" images as postmeta. Or tag images and use some kind of
> taxonomy scheme. Half a dozen different ways.
>
> You need to define the problem before defining how to solve it. What
> is the problem that you're wanting to solve here? Do you want some way
> to select images from a thumbnail UI and have those then "attached" to
> that post in some manner? Or what?