New and improved file uploading experience in Confluence Cloud

[jchu]

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 Ohrbom]

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?

[jchu]

Hey James! Thanks for the questions.

• upload a file and create a text link to it?
  • We currently do not offer this capability but we have it on our roadmap for the near-future. 
• select from just the files already attached to the page?
  
  • This was a feature that we de-prioritised as part of the new editing experience as it was not used frequently. Could I ask what this feature helps you with? It's currently not on our immediate roadmap, but keen to hear what you're trying to do. 

• find and link to a file attached on another page?
  • Same as above. We currently do not have this capability but keen to understand how often you need this/what you wish to achieve through this.

[James Dellow]

select from just the files already attached to the page?

I think your assumption is that a page is created and files are upload all as one task - so I'm sure that in most cases that is true. But when I go back to change a page or reorganise later in time, how do I find something attached on the page already?

It isn't about frequency, but the ability to deal with an exception when it arises.

find and link to a file attached on another page?

I want to link to the file on the other page, so that I don't duplicate the file. I couldn't tell you how frequently I use this, but its a feature I've used it time and time again over the years I've been using Confluence.

I assume at some stage the new editor will also be extended to comments?

If I want to point a user to particular file in reply to a question that could be on the same page or another page, how will I do that?

Copying and pasting the link to the file might work, but files links are a bit messy in Confluence - using the dialog was always a more reliable way of doing it.

[James Dellow]

It would be helpful if the UI also provided some hints about where the file is saved and the version - e.g these are both the same file:

And once it is uploaded, why is the file size relevant anyway?

[jchu]

James, really great, thanks a lot for all of the feedback. Highly appreciate it!

We'll prioritise these accordingly as we take in other feedback. This helps me understand why these features are important. 

Re: the UI of the file cards, we're also making improvements on those shortly as well. Hopefully it'll help you differentiate files in the picker! 

[Thomas Ohrbom]

I agree with @James Dellow here, on all three items. Here are my additions:

upload a file and create a text link to it

The file cards take up way too much space, especially if you need to refer to (link to) a file in-line in a document, which is the typical way of referencing.

select from just the files already attached to the page

Often when writing documentation you will want to link to an attachment (file) in the text, but also link to the same attachment (file) under a References heading in the document. It would then make no sense at all to upload the same file twice to the Confluence page. The maintenance will be a nightmare.

In other cases it is convenient to for instance upload 10 images to a page at once, and then when you write the page content you add in the individual images as you go. You might even want to add the same image more than once on the same page.

find and link to a file attached on another page

This also helps with maintenance. You want to duplicate as little as possible to help maintain the correct versions of your files.

[Nils Spelt]

@jchu In this chain you mentioned in March last year that adding a link to an attached file would be possible in the near-future.

So far I'm not seeing any link options at all for the PPT slide I've attached for download on our Service Desk, and the rendering on the file thumbnail once published looks really bad.

Because both embedded PPT slides using the /ppt macro and file thumbnails have this poor quality I have resorted to saving my slides as PNG, pasting that image into my article and then dropping the file below it as well. The result is one great looking image and one poor looking thumbnail below it for download purposes.

Ideally I would like to be able to either:

- Click the nice looking image and get a download prompt to download the slide that was attached as a different file

OR

- Have a perfectly beautiful rendering of the slide so I don't have to add an image to link it to in the first place

I'd appreciate an update on this.

[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.

[mani]

yup, we had similar usecase, we used plantuml and now there is no way to render images from a url

we want this !!

[Deleted user]

Same here, I have some status badges I'd like to add. Obliviously they need to link to an external image as it need to be updated automatically. 

[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. 

[Darren Warta]

Although I don't use the labels on images very often, I was planning on using them to filter-out certain images that other teams shouldn't see.  For example, setting a label that indicates that an image which contains sensitive material and filtering-out those images in the gallery.

[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.

[Deleted user]

My solution was to create a html file.

Make a tag <img src="http://server.com/path/to/image.svg"> 

Load the HTML file in the browser

And copy and paste to the confluence article.

[Domenico Albani]

Sorry, but I could not reproduce in Confluence Cloud.
It did not work for me.

Sadly, I could not find a HTML macro either, which could have done the trick.