Embed an updatable image into a page

[Sam Morley-Short]

The documentation on displaying images in pages here claims that you can embed images from other pages, but this seems not to be possible in the new editor.

My use case is this: I have an image that I want to embed in many documents simultaneously such that when I update the original image, the embedded versions in all other pages. 

Is this possible? It would seem that if you could embed an image as described in the documentation, then this would be possible via updating the original image, but otherwise, I cannot see how this would be achieved.

[Shannon S · Accepted solution]

Hello Sam,

Welcome to Atlassian Community! It's great to have you.

I've found that the Cloud version of the Display Files and Images article you found mentions the same procedure, as we haven't completely rolled out the new editor yet to all customers. This will be updated as soon as that roll-out is complete.

The feature is, as you have discovered, removed from the new editor.

See our Confluence Cloud Editor Roadmap, under Features that have been removed.

Add attachment from another Confluence page

This feature would let you add an attachment to one Confluence page and then display it on multiple other pages. This would cause a number of dependency issues, such as where someone would unknowingly delete the image from the first page, and it would leave an error on all the other pages. In order to prevent this from happening, we've removed this functionality.

If this functionality was important to you, you can achieve the same thing by using the excerpt and excerpt include macros. The excerpt macro lets you put some Confluence content into an excerpt, which you can then use the excerpt include macro to display on a number of other pages.

Any changes you make to the excerpt will flow through to all the pages that the excerpt include is used on.

I hope that helps, but if you have any feedback, you can share it in our discussion on the new editor.

Take care,

Shannon

[Tom Crowley]

That's really great Shannon, except that this way takes longer and deleting the image from the Excerpt still removes it from the other pages...

[Shannon S]

Tom,

I can definitely see how that would be a lot more clumsy than simply using the feature as it was before. Definitely share that feedback in the discussion thread I linked! The development team is watching that conversation.

Take care, 

Shannon

[Helen Gosper]

Hi Shannon Shannon Spaniol please also see my comment here: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-discussions/Try-out-the-new-editing-experience/td-p/1000813/page/5?utm_source=atlcomm&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=kudos_reply&utm_content=post#M5135

I have relied heavily on this functionality in the development of two large technical documentation spaces. The suggested 'workaround' is just not relevant to this use case.  The excerpt tool - as I have noted in comments elsewhere (and apologies for the duplication but there seem to be a lot of threads about the new editor) - is ideal for its own stated purpose but isn't an acceptable process that could be considered a replacement for  the expected and traditional behaviour of the ability to insert an image that lives in a' library'.

If there a definite plan to reintroduce this, and if so could you please refer me to the ticket in JIRA? thanks

[Shannon S]

Hello Helen,

As far as I am aware, the feature has been discontinued, but if any features are to be brought back then they will be mentioned in our Confluence Cloud Editor Roadmap. Please make sure to also share your feedback in the aforementioned discussion about the new editor, which is being hosted by one of the members of the product management team for the new editor.

• Discussions: Try out the new editing experience!

Regards,

Shannon

[Sam Morley-Short]

@Helen Gosper

My workaround is to create a new page that only contains the image in question in and then to use the "include page" macro to include the image into other pages. You can then update the image across those pages by editing the one-image page.

It's not idea, but worked well for my use-case.

Best of luck!

Sam

[Helen Gosper]

@Sam Morley-Short appreciate your reply and interest. As you say that 'workaround' isn't ideal. It's not really a workaround, as it also requires adding an individual image to a page in the first place, at the required size. 

I already have an image library, comprising dozens of pages, each with dozens of images attached. To try to translate this into your suggestion would take days and days and still not be a real solution.

Atlassian, please either provide the functionality that was removed without proper consideration, or provide a cms-style 'image/snippets' library tool.

[Helen Gosper]

Replying to @Shannon S above:

Thanks for your reply @Shannon S

I already had added my feedback to the discussion and have requested that this feature be reinstated.

[Shannon S]

Thank you for that! 

Take care, and have a pleasant week. 

Regards,

Shannon

[Helen Gosper]

I wouldn't call this a 'workaround', but a way of achieving the desired result (at least for now, unless this falls victim to a change) is as follows:

• Rather than create a new page, copy an 'old' one - as in a page you created before the 'new editing experience' was released (or in my case, before moving from server to cloud).
• Strip out the content and use the page as usual. The 'old' functionality is retained, i.e., you can embed from an image library. 
• You can keep a copy of an old page handy for such an occasion (a bit like a pseudo template). 

It's not as painful as it sounds. Im my use case, being able to use this functionality in this way will still save me content management/maintenance time in the long run.

Just for the record, I do NOT recommend doing with internal collaboration pages (I'm not crazy!), just for a public technical doco space.

Interested to know if anyone else is doing this?