Forum
Perch 3 - Search Assets gone??
I was really hoping for an amazing upgrade to the painful Assets app with Perch 3 - but now it seems like it's even worse.
Two major problems:
Search is gone. Why? It didn't work well, but at least I could find images. Now that's almost impossible unless you go back to every single asset you have (in some of my sites, that's thousands of images) and tag them. Why not search the image name? It's very simple, easy to remember, nothings to add on. Please add this feature back in as soon as possible, it's definitely a choking point.
Switching or adding an existing asset. When adding or changing an image, the Assets panel only shows the latest X amount of photos/media. But without search or even pagination to drudge through images, it's now not even possible to get an image that's beyond the first bunch of images. So if you have more than, say, 20 images, you're stuck.
I vote for an entirely new Assets app. When assets grow, this app is really painful and time consuming to use. And now with even the simple ability the search (which it wasn't great at to begin with) is now gone. Am I missing something?
Please help - thanks in advance!
Hi Leigh, to quote Drew in a previous forum post:
'It's not permanent, it'll be coming back soon. We just had to cut it from the initial release due to time constraints.'
https://forum.grabaperch.com/forum/04-01-2017-perch-3-rocks-but-where-is-asset-search
Ah, thanks Simon. Couldn't find that when I searched the forum before posting (how ironic).
I hope the search feature is AMAZING since I was really hoping for a new approach to asset management. Been using Perch since the very beginning and while this Version 3 has a somewhat cleaner UI, it really isn't as different as I had been expecting. Drew mentioned that it wouldn't be released until everything was ready. Seems odd it's out and we're here spending time on updates and it's not really ready for prime time yet. So I'm a bit confused when huge features like image search are missing. :/
Looking forward to cleaner release and I'll hold off an updating any other sites until it's all hashed out. Cheers mate!
Not every feature we'll ever put into 3.x or even 3.0.x is in 3.0.0. There's a big update to Assets planned.
The search feature will not be AMAZING because it will always be limited by the technology available on your server.
Ok thanks Drew. Do you have a timeline for the Assets app update? I'm not sure I get the search feature limits. You're saying that an image uploaded with a name like apple-tree.jpg doesn't get indexed in the current Assets app with tags for "apple" and "tree"? What can I learn about my server setup that might help get a much better search experience with the assets?
Also, do you have a work around for finding an image currently without the search? Am I force to upload the original asset again to find it?
We're limited to using MySQL FULLTEXT search, which is itself very limited. You can't change that. We can't change that. So we're never going to be able to make an AMAZING search for people unless we started to offer some search service, which would have to be a subscription.
Even so, most people aren't uploading filenames that would make for nice tags so that is a limited use case, it might serve you but not all the people who upload directly from their camera with names like IMG0153436.jpg! We have to prioritize against the things that will make the most difference to the most people. That sometimes is going to mean that something you really want isn't a priority unfortunately. We've bundled all of the assets stuff into a separate release or releases as it made no sense to hold back the rest of the work for that, as all of the features that other people are now using and finding useful would just be sat here waiting.
Ok thanks for the explanation Rachel. So is there a date for when the bundled assets stuff is going to be updated? Weeks, months? Just trying to get a handle on how to use this update without this crucial (to me at least) feature.
We don't release dates, as there are too many potential variables that can delay things.
We're trying to ship smaller iterations from this point. By necessity redeveloping the entire UI becomes a massive deal, so we are looking forward to being able to ship smaller releases to get features out as quickly as possible to people.
Assets search is reinstated in the 3.0.6 release: https://grabaperch.com/update/v3-0-6