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Confluence Cloud link to attachment not possible?

unknown

I'm using Confluence Cloud.

When I want to link some text in the page I am used to clicking on the link icon and then having a choice to link to attached files on the page.

This seems to be gone. All I get is pages I can link to, but no choices to select anything else. What am I missing? I checked the docs and they all say you can select Link > Search etc., but that does not show up in my page in edit mode.

I'm on a Mac and use Chrome latest.

Accepted answers

All comments

Diego_88dj6o

Hello there!

Currently, Confluence Cloud has been relaying a new editor called the Fabric Editor.

The documentation points to the previous editor, TinyMCE. You can check more information about our new editing experience here!

Confluence Editing Improvements

Try out the new editing experience

The new editing experience: we're listening Edited

We do have an issue reported here:

CONFCLOUD-65640 | Cannot add link to image in Fabric Editor

We can still workaround this by uploading the files using this procedure:

Enter Edit mode

Click File & Images icon in the toolbar

Upload your file / Select from recently uploaded

Publish the page

Also, we can use the Attachment Macro and show the attachments on the current page.

Let us know if this helps you out Ron! Looking forward to your reply.

marcel_19zhad

Funny how a post about missing features is answered with a link to 'Confluence Editing Improvements'.

I have been using Confluence for a few months and it seems like every week I find myself searching for a feature I'm sure was there before but has gone missing for some reason (linking to attachments, linking to undefined pages et cetera).

With these features missing or becoming less intuitive, working in Confluence is slowly becoming a cumbersome experience...

Brian Carlsen

The problem with the workaround is visually it creates this ugly block tile to represent the file and there's no way to change the view of that.

If what you want is just a link (with whatever text you want) to the attachment:

A better workaround, which is pretty annoying is to save the page, use the 3 dots in the upper right corner to go to the "attachments" area. Upload your attachment, then right-click on that and obtain the actual link to that attachment. Then go back and edit your page, highlight the text where you want a link, click the link and paste in the copied URL for the attachment.

And just for the record, I agree that this Fabric Editor is a significant downgrade in the ease of using confluence. It also won't let you create a child page in an inline way like you used to be able to do by typing [

Jeff Pannone (BA)

I agree with Brian C above. This is one of many drawbacks to the new fabric editor. The learning curve from old to new is steep and in many cases core features that improved efficiency are removed/non-existent.

Jawann

I really wish the new editor had feature parity with the old editor before it was released.

unknown

It's now January 2020 and the feature of linking to an attachment is still not fixed. This is not an improvement, it is a degradation of what was a good product. This is not an isolated instance, there are many, many more. At some point the pain will be become too great to use the product.

Peter Halverson_pvewyv

Can we get the name(s) of the most senior leader(s) who signed off on changing the editor without first making it feature-complete with the existing one? I'd like to hear their rationale.

Rui Fraga

Just found this out today as well. Absolutely unbelieavable.

Kim Hirschman

Me too. By the way: here is what popped up when I clicked on the link icon in this comment box (so Atlassian still recognizes that this is what people are expecting)

Zsolt Jacsó

This is unbelievable..

I really hope that some incompetent managers will be fired!

Steve Wilson_ca5noe

Crazy old game when the latest and 'greatest' is years behind the old tool. First message in this chat is just over 12 months ago. Anyone listening?

Fix linking!

Kiran Mistry

I found this by accident today. I was importing a MSWord document to make into a page. Which was all OK. I then wanted to insert a document into the page just created. The "Insert files and images" menu was different to the standard one but it did the job. After that it inserted the document which came up as an icon and then by clicking on the icon it also offered me to view as a link. So what I did next was to import a blank MSWord document (with minimal text - just a title) so as to make a page and then inserted my file as mentioned above.

Seems to work.!

Jawann

This works because the Word import results in a page based on the old editor. You can achieve the same thing by copying an existing page based on the old editor or choosing the old editor from the list of templates (assuming it's available in your site). If Legacy editor page is not available in your site, you should be able to enable it by talking with your admin or contacting support. See here for details about new vs. old editor: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-Cloud-articles/Change-to-your-content-is-in-your-hands/ba-p/1324476. I use the old editor exclusively and don't foresee that changing any time soon.

Annotation 2020-04-14 081752.png

Kiran Mistry

I don't have the legacy editor but will make a request to support. Many Thanks for the info.

John Douglas_r7fgif

It's now May 2020 and it's still not fixed.

dave.drexler

Just adding a 'plus one' to the many complaints above. Atlassian: you say you're listening, but there's no evidence of that unless you actually DO something with the feedback. The new editor and lots of other UX changes have been awful.

Verena_lre500

I work in documentation where one of the most important principles is "single source" / "reuse". So I neatly sorted all my images on thematic file lists to include them in pages from there, and broke down my texts into small text snippets to include whatever I needed when creating a specific documentation.

Now I can't include pictures from my file lists any more, I can only include images I store in some dropbox (surely I want to set up yet another storage space for documentation resources when I thought I had Confluence for that ...) or have just uploaded recently (which also only leads to a duplication of the upload) - meaning I have to re-upload that to every page where I need it, and god forbid that I ever have to change it.

Plus, I can't justlink to any of my pages at any time like I could so far - I first have to visit it so it appears in the list of pages I can link to. Which makes putting together a documentation that needs to point to specific background information every now and then a very frustrating experience (and my documentation is small compared to what I know about some machine documentation with hundreds of modules ...).

All in all, I get the impression the planning for Confluence has been taken over by the Jira team or some other people from social media, and they think it is just another blog or whatever, and have no idea of how documentation is put together and what the requirements are.

JP_pf79fx

Couldn't agree more Verena.

Kirsty Davidson

This is such a backwards step. I thought I was being stupid not being able to figure out how to 'save as a link' the docs I was dropping on a page. It has taken me 90minutes to figure out how to do this and achieve the result I was hoping for.

I had 6 docs to drop on, and would've been able to do this in a couple of minutes before, For each one before: 3steps: drag & drop, right click, save as link. When done Publish. Now I think I figured out it took me 12 steps each and some typing and back and forth. Probably a couple of minutes per file.

It absolutely sucks, so much so I've decided to leave the ugly boxes for each file on another page.

Atlassian - get a grip!

Saulius Petraitis

I don't see a reason to be so polite as others. Verena is right about everything. I guess there is some idiot behind this terrible idea to introduce "unusable improvements". Hope he is now fired and can not sleep at the moment.

Julie_g8fsk3

Should be straight-forward but isn't. I faked it out.

How to link an attachment in Conflluence

Click the … to add the attachment

Copy the .url from the attachment

Open the page to edit it.

Click the link attachment (or cntl-K) and add whatever it’s defaulting to (will edit the link after)

Right click to edit the link, paste the .url from the attachment and enter.

Right click again to edit the link, and change the name of it to whatever you want.

Patricia Desmond

September and still we wait

Mr. Wilson

This seems a little crazy. Overall the new look and feel of the editor is pretty terrible but I can get by with the ugly tables and overall lack of formatting options however this is by far the worst I've found so far. T-T

Peter_hkzw3f

I am less and less impressed with Atlassian products the longer I use them.

Abbas Dar

Can you not do this already on the sever version? Therefore why's it not available on the cloud version?

What we want is if there is a line of text, I want to be able to do select that line of text, click 'Add Attachment' and the attachment will be hyperlinked to that line of text and attached into the page.

I really thought this existed in the server version!

Paul Dekker

This is really disappointing, not to be able to link an attachment ... Shame on you Atlassian!

I solved it by copying an "old" page which uses the "old" editing features.

I hope Atlassian will attend this.

Kim Hirschman

Is the restoration of this feature even on the development roadmap? We need to know whether the Atlassian decision makers are taking the issue seriously.

Michaelx4g

It's still not working

J Fincher

+1 on wanting this feature back.

Robert Horan

Is there a link to a bug fix for this item?

Lars Dammann

There is and probably will not be a fix for this huge pile of crap. Atlassian doesn't care, as long as da money comes rollin' in, baby, yeah...

So first we have been forced to migrate to Atlassian Cloud, just to learn that key concepts which we used in Confluence do not work any longer. This effectively costs me so much effort and the company it costs money - great move, Atlassian, great move! But probably there is a 500 bucks/month addon somewhere out there to fix this.

Muhammad Akram Sharifi_y6l7bk

This is crazy Still not fixed Nov/11/2021

Corey.Hampton

This is the dumbest functionality ever!!! I need to save my page, go to attachments, get the link for one attachment, go back and edit my page to add the link, then save my page, go back to attachments to get my next link.

You removed core functionality and never fixed it.

Kevin Ryan_5ho1rv

Today I may have found a workaround -- not as sleek as right clicking the large, garish thumbnail and easily converting it to a link (a convenience lost with Confluence Cloud), but it seems to have worked for me today: Bring up the Attachments page by clicking ". . ." > Attachments. This lists all attachments on the page with hyperlinks for each. Then I can right click my chosen link in the Name column, copy it, return to the Edit screen, type my link text, and assign my copied link to it.

Looks like other contributors on this page have suggested this, but it does not hurt to suggest it again.