Hi everyone, I’m the PM on the Media team. The Media team looks after file uploading and previewing files on a Confluence page or Jira ticket.
In September last year we wrote on Community to let you know that features in the Media picker popup were being removed. A reminder of those features:
Not many of you used this feature, fewer than 0.3% of files are added this way. We heard loud and clear from customers, that this feature wasn’t working as expected. This was because it copies files over rather than linking to them.
Confluence already has a good alternative, you can use Slash commands to insert Google and Dropbox files.
And there is an even faster alternative available using Smartlinks. In Jira and Confluence you can copy a link to a file from Google (even from a Shared Team Drive) or Dropbox and paste it into your page or ticket. This creates a handy Smartlink reference to the file.
And of course you can still get Giphy files into Confluence by copying and pasting them in.
We see a very small % of customers who use the Recents feature weekly. Furthermore without the ability to filter or search Recents, customers we have spoken to often end up just re-uploading their files.
It is important to note that when we remove Recents all files you have already added to your Confluence pages or Jira issues will remain there.
As mentioned above copying links to files from Google and Dropbox can be achieved with Smartlinks. We do think this is a better solution than copying files. As operating systems contain a reference of Recent files you can continue to upload or drag and drop files into Products from your local machine.
We realised that without Cloud picking and Recent files, there is not a big need for the Media picker popup at all. We’ve seen that the majority of you are uploading a single file. So the extra steps to upload and add files into a page seemed unnecessary. Therefore we’ll be removing the Media picker popup, you’ll be able to use native file uploads provided by your browser instead. This will still let you select multiple files.
Many of you are dragging and dropping files straight onto Confluence pages or Jira tickets, or are using Copy and paste to get your files into Atlassian. You’ll still be able to do this, so no change there.
These change to Cloud picking, Recents and the Media picker popup will be starting to rollout to Jira, JSM, Confluence and Bitbucket in the next month.
While we think these workarounds are suitable we are aware some of you may have some more niche use cases. We are thinking about different ways for you to get files and links into our products. If you’d like to be part of this conversation please let me know in the comments below.
Owen Wallis
Senior Product Manager
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