Friday, January 02, 2009

A workaround for image uploading to Microsoft’s Sharepoint Wiki.

There are some good things to say about Microsoft’s Sharepoint based Wiki.

There’s also, sadly, one very bad thing. The approach to image embedding is lousy.

Happily I have found a convoluted workaround that uses one of my favorite apps – Windows Live Writer …

  1. Create a SP blog that will hold the images that will be referenced in the wiki.
  2. Use Windows Live Writer to post to the wiki-image-blog. Drop your image into WLW, resize it as needed, etc. If you like, use WLW to write your image associated wiki text first draft as well.
  3. After you post to the Wiki, copy and paste image and text into the Wiki editor rich text field.

This takes surprisingly little time, far less than any other option I've read of. I admit, it is convoluted!

Update 1/11/09: I've been doing this for a while now. It's bloody brilliant, even if I have to say so myself. You can take advantage of the wiki-image-blog to attach a bit of metadata, including labels, to help with image reuse. If you read this and know anyone using Sharepoint 2007, I suggest send this on to them. They'll be forever grateful.
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6 comments:

  1. Anonymous5/5/09 1:51 PM

    What about solutions instead of workarounds?

    Here are two plug-ins that let you add the images in the wiki.

    http://www.hezser.de/blog/archive/2007/07/23/updated-wiki-webpart.aspx

    http://www.codeplex.com/ImageUpload

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  2. JGF5/5/09 2:11 PM

    These would be great, but they require cooperation from the corporate IT group that runs Sharepoint.

    Alas, that's not an easy thing.

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  3. Joan24/3/13 11:31 PM

    Just found this workaround. It works beautifully! Thank you so much!

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  4. Joan8/4/13 12:47 AM

    Hi John,

    This worked at first, but when I went back to my wiki page (which showed all the images) a few days later, I can no longer see the images. Instead I see a white box with a little red X. I looked at the HTML source, it showed the image as a file on my harddrive (temp folder). Any idea what I am doing wrong?

    Thanks!
    Joan

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  5. JGF8/4/13 8:07 PM

    Hi Joan,

    If the image is on your hard drive I don't think you ever uploaded it to the blog post ...

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  6. Joan12/4/13 1:38 AM

    Hi John,

    Thanks for responding. No I didn't specifically upload the image to the blog post. I copy and pasted in WLW, then publish the post to the blog before copying the image and text to wiki editor. The images are showing on the blog, but not in the wiki. Immediately after saving the wiki, the images are showing.

    I followed your instructions, how do I upload the images to the blog post?

    Thanks,
    Joan

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