Managing images with CKEditor 5
In choosing the best way to manage images, there are two important decisions to be made. First, where do you want to store your images? In the cloud? On your local server? Somewhere else? These options both have pros and cons for your developers, as they’ll be the ones integrating our technology into your application. The sooner you decide, the easier integration will be.
The other is about equipping your user base with the editor features they need to get visual results. How hands-on are your software’s users with visual media? Do you need to resize and crop photos regularly? Do you do enhanced styling with your images? You don’t want to give them any more capability than they’ll know what to do with, and certainly not any less.
Luckily, you don’t have to make these decisions in the dark. Here is a quick overview of your storage and feature options in wrangling images with CKEditor 5 so you can give users the control they need.
# Where would you like to store your images?
You’ve got five options.
Easy Image ensures that images are securely stored in the CKSource cloud (powered by Amazon Web Services US), which means you can forget worrying about maintaining your own storage. You’ll get responsive images quickly, making it the perfect solution for displaying images on mobile devices. Its simple configuration means that setup is virtually effortless, but the flipside is that it doesn’t have the full array of digital asset manager features.
CKFinder is a digital asset manager that lets you organize and edit images and manage your storage, making it perfect for any CMS, marketing or document management online. CKFinder is built for on-the-fly integration with Amazon S3, Dropbox, and Azure, and is ideal for when you need to quickly integrate with your ASP.NET, PHP or Java-based backend, as well as your local disk or FTP sites.
Base64 means all uploaded and copy/pasted images are stored within your document. As a result, setup is a breeze and there’s no need to worry about a separate storage location for your content. On the other hand, documents may become too large due to the size of uploaded images. However, this used to be an issue a few years ago. Now, with decreasing storage and traffic prices, it shouldn’t be one.
The simple upload adapter plugin allows you to upload images to your server with minimal editor configuration. It also helps the editor and your server communicate, leaving the server-side implementation of file uploads in your hands.
If none of these suit you, or your project has its own specific requirements, then consider implementing your own custom upload adapter using our public APIs, which will allow you to take full control over the process of sending the files to the server as well as passing the response from the server back to the editor.
# Which features are important for your end users?
Now that you’re familiar with our storage options it’s time to think about what features you need to help your users get hands-on with the image editing process. Our Images package comes with basic image support that can be extended with many other plugins, such as:
- Image upload
- Image styles
- Captions and text alternatives
- Contextual toolbars
- Responsive images
- Cropping, resizing, and rotating
- Linking images
Don’t see what you want from our features? Make it yourself. CKEditor 5’s framework allows you to tweak and twiddle the editor’s features to get the results you want. For the daring, you can design your very own CKEditor 5 plugin and insert it into your customizable UI. Our documentation will provide you with every step and snippet of code your development team needs to integrate smoothly whatever features and plugins you desire (or not).