New and improved file uploading experience in Confluence Cloud

[#1]

Hey Community!

My name is Jenny and I am a Product Manager in our Cloud Media team. Our team is super excited to share that we are shipping an improved file uploading experience for everyone using the new Editor on Confluence. Here’s a little preview to show you what it looks like:

What’s different with our file upload experience?

• Easy multi-upload: easily select more than one file at a time to quickly upload files.

• Express yourself with GIFs: for times when words just aren’t enough, pick a GIF that truly expresses how you feel.

• Connect to Google Drive or Dropbox: access and upload files from your favourite Cloud file storage system. 

• Sync files across Jira and Confluence: whatever you upload on Confluence will appear in your “Recents Uploads” in Jira, and vice versa!

We have enabled our new file upload experience for anyone that is using our new Editor. If you don’t have the new editing experience it’s available as a template, so you can try it out whenever you’d like.

If you have any feedback or questions, please post your thoughts here. We’re excited to hear from you.

[Thomas Øhrbom]

Thanks! We have been waiting for this. Should have been launched together with the new Fabric Editor, but we're happy it is here now.

[James Dellow]

Some questions - using the new editor/file upload experience, how do I

• upload a file and create a text link to it?
• select from just the files already attached to the page?
• find and link to a file attached on another page?

[iain mcewen]

find and link to a file attached on another page

Important for easy maintenance, I like to attach all UI screen images (.png) to one page and then reference them from other pages - when the UI changes it makes life simple to update the image files in one location. Unless someone has a better way of managing screen captures in confluence... 

[Kyle]

The current online documentation for confluence cloud https://confluence.atlassian.com/confcloud/display-files-and-images-724765104.html indicates that image thumbnails can be resized and displayed as links.

@jchu from your reply above I take it that feature is no longer available. Will the confluence cloud documentation be updated, or will that feature be added back in at some point? Do you have a reference for that issue that I can watch?  Thanks.

[Alex Drummond]

@jchu all 3 points made above are key features. Please can you let us know when they will be available again so i can manage my teams expectations.

[James Blackwood]

It's unfortunate that you have chosen to introduce an 'improved' file upload experience by breaking a key feature that was operating perfectly in the previous version of the editor - namely the ability to display a file as a link.

The absence of this crucial functionality is forcing me to consider alternative platforms and has frankly ruined the user experience in relation to referencing files within the body of a page.

In March 2019 you said this was in your roadmap for the 'near future', but we're now entering September 2019 and it's still not available.  Please, are you able to restore this important functionality.

[Philippe Rüesch]

We also miss the functionality to insert an image by an URL. In our case we create often some diagrams with Google Drawing and like to insert these images by URL. The benefit is, that you can create an URL within Google Drawing that will been refreshed for all changes you made on this drawing in the future. So you never have to update this image again in your confluence page AND you can just set a link from this image in confluence to the Google Drawing document, so that it can be updated if necessary. In the old page format this works great with the "insert image by URL" functionality. Now, this feature has disappeared. It's really a pity.

[Roman Konovalov]

Very disappointed with the new editor. We use Balsamiq to design our screen mockups. Technically, in every Space, we create one page Screen Mockups that contains Balsamiq project. Balsamiq saves all the mockups as png files attached to that Screen Mockups page.

Then, we create one page that describes every mockup: data fields, colours, font sizes etc including a mockup picture shown from the Screen Mockups attachments. If we have more than one page referring to the same mockup, they all use the same png file attached to the Screen Mockup page.

This way, once we revise a mockup in the Balsamiq project, all our pages get updated automatically because attachments on the Screen Mockup page are updated by Balsamiq.

Now it is all gone.

[Roman Konovalov]

Plenty of people complaining on the similar issues https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-questions/Switch-to-old-Editor-possible/qaq-p/1104580

What was the point to break something that worked so well in the previous Editor?

[Darren Warta]

While I have enjoyed many features of the new editor, one in particular is causing us problems.

Attachments (and attachments from other pages) do not appear to be available to be used as images on the page.

This was a very important feature that we used in keeping our documentation up to date.  I have several pages that depend on an image updating across multiple pages, such as a Network Diagram.  Those images were stored as attachments.

Someone suggested using the excerpt macro, but this is not a feasible work-around as we have multiple versions of the same image on a single page.  For example, we have versions of the Network Diagram for Cloud Operations and another for customers (where the sensitive/confidential details are removed).  The excerpt macro only allows one excerpt per page; it would be wonderful if the excepts could be named or numbers for inclusion in other pages, but that would only partially help.

In order to use this as described in the work-around, I'd have to create a page per image, which is a lot of work and would make future updates administratively burdensome. 

[Johanna Vaher]

A subject expert inserted a bunch of images on my page and did not bother with naming the files properly, so I went in to rename them. I can rename attachments, but when viewing the page, the inserted image still has the old name. :( Then I thought to myself "maybe it will change if I remove it from the page in the editor, and insert the attachment again, but no, it is impossible to insert that attachment again since it is not counted as "recently uploaded" :( This is not a logical way of organising attachments!

So now I guess my workaround will have to be this cumbersome:

• downloading all the images
• deleting the inserts of the images in the editor while leaving notes on where they were
• deleting the attachments
• renaming the downloaded images outside of Confluence Cloud
• inserting them on the page again

:( !

[Domenico Albani]

Inserting an image by an URL is also crucial to us.
We massively use external images from Google Drawing and others, we often update them. Being forced to re-upload the images is a crippling stage.
Someone who updates the image does not even know all the pages where it might have been uploaded first.