Posting More than 1 Image in a New Post

The Gluon and @manton’s photo-centric app (the name of which I can’t remember, feels like “sun” is involved somewhere) both allow for this.

Mimi is another app I use occasionally that is great at it’s one purpose, which is uploading a batch of photos and then letting you copy the necessary markdown or html for pasting into a post.

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Awesome - thanks for the feedback! I’ve got Gluon and I’ll check out Dialog as well. I’m an Android user so unfortunately Mimi won’t work for me.

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The web is the other answer. You can use the Uploads tab to copy the code for each image via the “Copy HTML” button.

That is my current workflow. Upload first photo with the post, save draft, write draft, go to uploads and upload remaining images, go back to posts, edit post, go back to uploads copy html, save draft, go back to uploads, copy htl save drafts.

I agree. A UI for multiple image upload per post be nice. Save me a few clicks

Or perhaps selecting images in the Uploads tab, and have an action to add them to a post?

My preferred way is to post from the iOS or iPadOS Photos app, with my selected images, and share it to the MB app as a post. Alas, it doesn’t seem to work on MacOS, but there you can far more easily select, drag and drop onto an empty document, I suppose (don’t have a Mac to test).

On Mac: Photos Uploads is buggy:
https://help.micro.blog/t/micro-blog-for-mac/45/6
not to mention time-consuming. If you wanna place images inline in Article you have to first add to Uploads, then copy from there.

Not trying to derail any discussion about how the MB Mac app works, but for an excellent experience on the Mac with MB posting try MarsEdit. I’ve used the app for decades now and its developer Daniel Jalkut is also a MBer (and friend of Manton’s). Easy image uploads, placed wherever you want, plus lots of other bonus features.

appreciate the suggestion.
I try to stay 1st party where possible though to reduce entropy!

FWIW a direct stated goal of Micro.blog is that it’s published API ensures a supported, equally good experience with non-first party apps. So while I hear you, I wouldn’t worry about the entropy side.

Re. 3rd party apps: Ahh good to know! In that case I’d be interested in trying any 3rd party apps bespoke designed for M.b. I expect legacy apps are too much serving other use cases.

I came here looking for an answer to “how to upload multiple images” and as I read through the responses I realised just how ridiculous the situation is.

To create a multiple image blog post the worflow is:

  1. Upload one image at a time. 10 images? Click image upload 10 times.
  2. Create new post.
  3. Save as draft.
  4. Go to upload sections and copy HTML for image.
  5. Go pack to Post section and edit post.
  6. insert HTML
  7. Save as draft.
  8. repeat steps 4-7 for the number of images you need.
  9. publish post.

The need to use a third-party iOS or macOS app is ridiculous.

You could use an app like Mimi Uploader and upload in batches, it will generate links for you that you can copy and paste them, then its a matter of adding the text. I personally use Ulysses to compose posts with images. Or you could use micro.blog’s own Sunlit app

Oh unless you are talking from the web editor…

Yes, the web version can definitely be improved. It’s not quite as bad as you describe, though, as you can have the upload section and the new post in different tabs or windows. No need to save drafts. Just switch to the tab containing the uploads, copy the HTML when needed, and switch back to the new tab containing the new post.

But, again, the user experience should be improved upon.

Thanks @Gaby, but that’s just another work around and still has the friction of multiple copy/paste round trips. I do my image edits on a Mac so using Sunlt is just more friction (export images to Mac file system, copy to iPhone using AirDrop, upload to micro.blog using Sunlit, delete copies from iPhone).

I see, for me, that friction went away when, at first started using iA Writer, and now ulysses. They both let you add images and post straight from the app.

Which is what I was doing for single image posts. Once it got to two or more and multiple rounds of copy/paste I gave up doing longer posts. I recommend micro.blog to somone and now I may regret it. I think he’s going to have similar issues.

Hopefully Manton addresses this limitation soon.

I think there are 2 separate things going on here:

  1. The web version of Micro.blog can’t upload more than 1 photo when creating a new post. This is definitely an annoying limitation and the official native apps don’t have this problem. If you’re using the Mac app, for example, you can just drag multiple photos in, add some text and click post, and you’re done. I want to improve the web version to match what the native apps can do.
  2. The web version and official apps (except Sunlit) don’t let you add text in between photos. This is by design to make posting a photo really easy. We could change the post editor to allow inline photos similar to WordPress, but that complicates posting, so instead we think having a rich set of third-party apps is better. Ulysses, Mimi Uploader, and MarsEdit are great for that.

Thanks for the feedback!

If I understand your response.

  1. Micro.blog is not designed to make writing blog posts like this one easy: Khürt Williams - Seneca Lake: Day One: Inn at Grist Iron, Grist Iron Brewing and Two Goats Brewing
  2. Micro.blog and the apps are designed for Twitter style image posts.

I would say that’s accurate, without stepping too much over Manton’s toes. The idea of Micro.blog’s apps, and in part the service, is to make blogging as easy and casual as posting on social media. The idea being that it’s better to post to your own blog than to centralized platforms. Social media succeeds in part because it makes it easy to post quick, casual content from anywhere and get it out there. That’s the microblogging focus and why micro is in the name.

That said, blogs can do a lot more, and Micro.blog hosted blogs can expand to do very complex stuff blogging on par with that on other platforms. But this problem, “How do I create/write rich, complex long form posts?” is largely supported by another part of the MB ethos-- we should use webstandards and APIs to allow for there to be many different client experiences to work with your own content. This allows Micro.blog the apps to keep its product focus on a missing part of the market-- fast, casual, social style posting. Micro.blog the hosting service and API platform has the focus of “being the place for all your personal blog content”. Apps other than the micro.blog apps can solve the problem of “great long form writing experience” because of the API.

Given that the team is Manton (over all apps and services), Jean (community), and now Vince (part time, little bit of everything technical) there has to be a place to draw the boundaries. The MB choice was that the boundary on the official apps were “great short form posting”, for the API"an uncompromised experience for clients of our official API to expand on what you can do on MB", and for the service, “a fast, powerful, flexible blogging platform with crossposting and replies”.

I write posts like the one you link to occasionally. I use MarsEdit for that personally. Sometimes iAWriter If most of my content was like that and I did not want to use third party native apps, I wouldn’t choose micro.blog as my host because that’s decidedly very far from Micro anything.

Thanks @jsonbecker, that’s a good summary. @khurtwilliams: I would say that Micro.blog’s default apps are optimized for short posts. Posts with a single photo are just much more common in my experience. We want that to be fast and easy.

I love multi-photo posts too, though, and that’s why we built Sunlit for iOS. Sunlit’s posting interface is all about photos + text interspersed. I created this post on my blog in Sunlit and then could tweak it after the basic layout and photos were all there.

It’s difficult to have a single UI that is good at both Twitter/Instagram-style posts and complex blog posts. It’s better to have a variety of apps that are good at what they do. WordPress’s block editor leans toward complex posts. Micro.blog leans to short posts.