Intro and full article image replacement plugin

This is more than a feature request. Is a new plugin request.

The core Joomla issue:
In an multi-user with contributors roles scenario, Joomla is very good since it allows granular control over categories. Who and where he is allowed to submit or even publish an article. If you imagine an average newspaper redaction there are sport, politics, entertainment and so on correspondents (users), each one has rights to publish in Sport, Politics, Entertainment categories (through User Groups and User Access Levels configuration).

But the core Joomla system for website's images rely on a common, shared with everybody, media library (the one from /images folder). This thing can become actually a huge security flaw. For example: What if a unsatisfied Sport corespondent decide to delete all images that he have access to? Meaning the whole /images folder and sub-folders!!! Or even worse, replace the original images with memes having the same filenames? A disaster for the newspaper! They can loose not only Sport section, but the whole online newspaper can be filled either with 404 or with junk meme images (or porn 🙂!

The Joomla granular rights management is excellent for categories but is useless for media management since there is absolutely no control on who manage what is on /images folder, AKA known as Joomla Media library repository.

Secondary but not critical reason: the way of choosing the article images require multiple steps: navigate through a huge repository, Upload new, choose the new uploaded file... save. This is a well known joomla drawback underlined multiple times to Joomla maintainer but here: we are at Joomla 5, the API and a lot of new features are built but the Intro-image and Full Article images interface and management system is the same as 16 years ago in Joomla 1.5 (with the exception of that "No description" checkbox... big SEO improvement). So I dont expect some improvements from their side. If they didn't care for 16 years...

The solution (if you are interested to build it)
A plugin that replace the Joomla native management from Article edit view and offers instead of it an upload field for each: intro and full article images. Without offering the navigation and management of Media Library folder /images. The images should be saved in the same place of Joomla db Table as the original does. (this is very important for ensuring compatibility with all the plethora modules and templates that take images from article object).

Upload where (in what folder structure)?
Let's assume the category ID as a subfolder and the article ID as start for a following random filename as the image file. Learned this from K2 component experience where it was possible to replace the K2 item image but it was a miss-functionality related to how cache works. (the new updated image has the same name as the old one and in frontend display the browser thinks that the old image is unchanged since it has the same name).
Therefore the replacing image process (uploading a new image file instead of old one because of various reasons) will require an extra step that should delete the old image file and upload a new image file but with a different name (for avoiding cache mechanism issue). And db changes accordingly...

Why not using an already custom field like ACF upload from Tassos?
I have mentioned this earlier as well. Because incompatibility with the whole rest of native and third party templates and modules. This custom field approach can be done but a plethora of overrides need to be built for replacing the display of $article->intro-image with the $cfvalues and the all rest (image description, class, caption). Same for $article-full-image...

The solution needs to be a plugin that overrides the native joomla "Images and Links" functionality, offering an interface of uploading only instead of "Select" navigate through media library folder, choose) in both editors: frontend and backend. The new upload functionality will have to include the deletion of the previous image file (if there is one) and place a new one in media folder and in the database.

Additional functionality may include image resizing, ratio cropping, all optional, site-wide or category based. But those are not critical since from experience users are either knowing what they are uploading either they are irrecoverable dumb and cannot make a difference between portrait and landscape ratios. For the second type of users you cannot do a safe and working piece of software ever.

Even more additional functionality (I have even published a small plugin for that in JED extensions.joomla.org/extension/news-dis...s/u-default-picture/ ) is to offer a fallback Generic Image (based on article's category image and/or a global site-wide defined image) if no intro and/or full article images are set. This is good for contributors that forget or don't care about how the website's layout will break since some modules or template features are expecting to pull an image in newspaper's homepage and find nothing in database. Believe me, some templates and modules are going to display totally broken layouts, especially with this responsive approach, when no image is found for one article. There where similar plugins but their approach was to use a plugin to generate $item->intro-image variable. Those plugins where not always instantiated in the plethora of templates frameworks and modules and the safest solution was to WRITE in Jdatabase the link to the images in order to ensure FULL compatibility, no matter what.

Why I address to you and not address this suggestion/request to other?
You are one of the few third party providers that shows both: commitment and knowledge about Joomla with plugins like Advanced Module Manager and Modules Anywhere and Articles Anywhere and Sourcerer and....

Please continue to make Joomla better with your work. I promise a full subscription as well, not that is a lot. I strongly believe that this plugin functionality can be a strong selling point for you.

Sincerely,
Mircea Rusu