A faster way to upload images - Be able to drag and drop and paste images into CKEditor

[Wolfr]

Adding an image to a blog post is an arduous process in my Craft CMS installation: I add a custom block, I am presented with a drawer, then a dialog, then a way to upload files, then editing the metadata, and then adding it to the entry.

In this video, you can see this process takes 34 seconds:

image.mp4

In Wordpress, this all but takes 3 seconds, and I can keep working on my blog post:

CleanShot.2025-11-11.at.08.26.02.mp4

With image-heavy blog posts, this process gets annoying.

What I would like is to be able to drag and drop images, or paste images from my clipboard, straight into CKEditor. In the background, the image then gets uploaded.

Editing the metadata I would do as a separate step (for adding captions, changing the presentation style or editing alt text)

I am new to Craft CMS, maybe there is way to enable drag and drop.

I think transforms are being added while saving the image (hence the long progress bar), but Wordpress does just the same - just in the background, not in the foreground.

[thupsi]

Hello @Wolfr and welcome to Craft! A tip to speed-up the uploading of assets is to drag-and-drop them on the actual asset field, which is not immediately obvious but works great, and can even upload images in a predefined folder (By the way, you could use the "Upload file" button instead of first opening the selection modal as you do in the video, but drag-and-drop is faster still).

Other than that you don't have to actually mess with "meta data" at the time of uploading the image, if you don't want to, unless you have specified the fields as required.

So, that leaves us with the actual opening of the drawer, the upload of the image and saving the nested entry. From these 3 actions the slowest and most crucial is indeed the upload. I'm not sure why in your case this appears to be so slow, but it's worth noting that Craft, depending on your config, may perform sanitization, striping of metadata, uploading to a remote volume etc. Are you using any image optimization plugins perhaps, that might do some additional processing on upload?

Having said that, being able to upload images asynchronously, that is without blocking the rest of the workflow, would surely be a nice enhancement. FR idea!

Also, one aspect that complicates things is that Craft, by design, does not have "default" or "native" blocks, like Gutenberg does, so if you should drop an image in CKEditor it would not know what kind of (nested) entry to create. A solution to that would be if we were given the option to define a default entry type (and a field within that entry type) for images that are dragged into a CKEditor field. Another FR idea maybe? 🙂

[Wolfr]

Thanks for the detailed answer @thupsi ! I checked what you mean, and dragging onto the asset field is indeed faster. That already helps.

Regarding upload speed, might be an issue to where I am today.

I think we do some image transforms on the PNGs and because what I tend to upload is PNG screenshots that are 1-3Mb the transform process might be the one causing the slowdown.

We use a custom image block to be able to control some logic surrounding the image; I understand that makes it impossible for Craft to know that it's an image (I don't know the exact naming of this but it's Image in the dropdown when clicking the “block types” in CkEditor)

All of the above still leaves me in a situation where image uploading is rather annoying. I am diving a bit deeper into Craft CMS to use it for some of our clients, so will probably be diving a bit deeper in this topic when I encounter the tech logic in website builds myself (this website was built by an external contractor)

[brandonkelly]

The progress bar is only for the actual image upload, not any processing that Craft will need to do once it’s fully uploaded (which is usually pretty quick).

I do agree it would be nice to be able to upload the image directly into CKEditor and have it automatically create a nested entry for the image, though – while allowing you to continue editing other content. We’ll look into that!

[Wolfr]

Thanks for the info @brandonkelly . I read your 15 years blog post the other day, nice to get an answer from the OG himself :) . I'll probably be around here more often as I dig into Craft deeper. Thanks for the thoughtful message.

[brandonkelly]

This is resolved for v5 (coming soon!) thanks to the following changes:

• Drag-n-drop uploading support (#486)
• New “Image Mode” setting that can optionally insert newly-added images as nested entries (#509)

[thupsi]

Looks perfect!

[Wolfr]

Amazing 😍

[brandonkelly]

We released v5 today, with those changes 🎉