Design a UI to allow various kinds of alterations to referenced Media entities in a modal

#8 & #13 : will be good

Hi, So if I am correct, the goal of this ticket is to:

1. design how to edit from the media library widget
2. design how the actual edit modal should look

If I am not mistaken, number 1 is OK, we have concensus to use the pencil edit icon.

So in order to get this issue fixed, we need a design with concensus for the edit modal, correct ?

> If I am not mistaken, number 1 is OK, we have concensus to use the pencil edit icon.

Not exactly, because there can be more than one edit actions -- so far we have use cases for translate, edit, and override. Any number of these may be present at the same time.

Thanks for the feedback. So for number 1, that should just be whatever the design of contextual links is ? So we have that already ?

Hi,

What's wrong with #8 proposal ?

I'm agreed with the fact we don't need to have tabs in the modal. Those will be independent operation, so with a correct title on the modal you can check what you are doing

Updated IS to get more feedback about #8's proposal.

About #8 - I think some sort of dropdown is the right way to go, as we have an extensible number of options here.

However, I'm not sure about inventing a new icon + dropdown UI pattern, when we already have dropbuttons.

I agree with the proposals to re-use the contextual links pattern here (pencil icon in a circle plus dropdown). It may be a new pattern on the administrative theme while editing content, but it is not a new pattern for getting to editing from the front-end (edit block, edit teaser) nor for sitebuilding from the administration side (edit view). It is the right pattern to use in the media reference which by default has a preview much like what one would see on the front end.

Note that browsing the media library as Grid also has the preview much like what one would see on the front end and it already uses the pencil icon so extending that to the contextual links style (the pencil icon opens a dropdown) is completely natural there as well, and for Table, the existing button dropdown should continue to be used.

Issue summary isn’t super clear what’s being suggested. To better help the Usability team it should be clear so they can quickly pick up

I don't see what I can add to the IS to make it clearer.

This would be great to improve the default media options via extensible contextual links to:

1. View
2. Edit
3. Translate
4. Download →
5. Delete

I'm adding the Download one as a common use case by our users, but an extensible widget would allow a method to add additional options per use case.

Usability review

We discussed this issue at 📌 Drupal Usability Meeting 2025-07-18 Active . The recording with a timestamp to the part addressing this issue can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgAuZ781Vdg&t=2900s. For the record, the attendees at the usability meeting were @benjifisher, @rkoller, and @simohell. This meeting was the second part of our walkthrough of the user tasks entailed in the issues listed in the issue summary as well as the media module in Drupal core in general. The first part of the walkthrough was covered in 📌 Drupal Usability Meeting 2025-07-11 Active and the link to the recording is https://youtu.be/FPYyputdZzQ.

The group is in line with the proposed solution to use the contextual link pattern. Users are already familiar with them from the frontend as well as Layout Builder, so being consistent using the same icon and behavior in the context of media items is a good idea.

The only detail that might have room for improvement from our perspective is the icon choice. The pencil icon has a rather specific affordance - people are used to that kind of icon solely in the context of actually editing something. But already the options used in the image in the issue summary (detach, override, and translate) have no close affinity to the concept of “editing” - the suggestion of a download option raised #25 → is blurring the line further. So we’ve wondered if it wouldn’t be the better choice to go with a more generic icon, something like the three vertical dots icon used on the navigation top bar or a downward facing caret icon? If the decision to use a different icon for the contextual link button should be taken, the icon should be changed for media items, the frontend and Layout Builder consistently - but that choice could probably be moved to a followup.

I'll remove the needs usability review tag and set the status back to needs work (but was not completely sure what the right pick should be, active or needs work)

If you want more feedback from the usability team, a good way to reach out is in the #ux channel in Slack.