Request for CKEditor image copy-paste functionality

[Tiffany Stull]

Hello all,

An instructor at UVA has requested the ability to copy and paste images easily into CKEditor.  In particular, he is interested in allowing students to include an image in a forum post without making it an attachment that must be opened separately or using the Image option to upload and insert it in the editor.  However, if added, this option should be available in CKEditor throughout Sakai.

Are other institutions interested in having easier CKEditor image embed functionality (cut and paste or drag-drop)?

If so, other than the difficulty of implementation, what considerations would need to be taken into account?  For example:

• Where do the images go in content?  Do different tools have different storage locations for them?
  
• Could any cleanup of the images be enabled so they are deleted from content if a user deletes the image from the item where it was uploaded (e.g. forum post, announcement, assignment)?

Thanks,
Tiffany Stull

[Shelley Stewart]

We're definitely interested in this feature! Thanks for sharing it, Tiffany.

For additional considerations, I'd love to have the opposite of what you say here too, i.e. 

"Could any cleanup of the images be enabled so they are deleted from content if a user deletes the image from the item where it was uploaded (e.g. forum post, announcement, assignment)?"

"Most often, faculty unknowingly delete image files from Resources b/c they don't recognize the file name. Later, they (or students) discover the image is now missing from the Forum, for example. They call for Support and it's a circus to figure out what happened, how do you search for a missing image? And can it somehow be restored or 'dialed back' to a previous date before the image was inadvertently deleted?"

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[Matthew Jones]

I believe the latest versions of CKEditor have internal support for Image Uploads that can be enabled.

https://sdk.ckeditor.com/samples/fileupload.html#uploading-dropped-and-pasted-images

I don't think it requires CKFinder (their commerical finder) and can work with elfinder. That's a good question though about where to the images go in the actual resources. For students I guess it would have to go into My Workspace. For instructors maybe it could go into a folder in their site? If it uploads to the users My Workspace though it wouldn't be available to other users. 

Sakai doesn't keep track of where something is linked from or how many times it's re-used. You could re-use an image multiple times so knowing that it's safe to actually delete something seems like a really large project.

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[Tiffany Stull]

Matthew,

As I have said before when storing student content in My Resources was proposed for other use cases on the mailing lists, I STRONGLY disagree with the idea of placing ANY student uploads automatically in a folder where those uploads must be made Public for instructors or classmates to access them.

Automatically making user content publicly available would be illegal:

• Making ANY student upload publicly available without the student's express knowledge and agreement would be a FERPA violation.
  
• Most images students upload are also governed by fair use copyright restrictions, and making uploaded content publicly available can violate copyright law.

Similarly, placing the images in the Resources tool could be problematic because, as far as I know, Resources doesn't distinguish between student and instructor uploads for the purpose of Import from Site and Duplicate Site.  Some facility for identifying the user role and not copying student content would need to be added.

A lot of tools send content to other locations than Resources in a site, and I assume that the suggested image upload via cut and paste would need to behave in the same way.

For example, the following items go somewhere in content that is NOT Resources:

• Attachments in Forums
• Attachments in Assignments
• Attachments and/or embedded audio in Tests & Quizzes (Samigo places audio recordings made with the CKEditor audio recording widget in some really bizarre place, so if instructors use the audio widget to create audio questions for their students, it's a huge problem because these don't migrate links or import cleanly into new sites)
• Attachments sent to a site email address via Email Archive
  

I guess cleanup isn't too much of an issue because other existing content isn't deleted when the item where it was uploaded is deleted.  For example, Email Archive attachments never delete when you delete an archived message.  Sometimes developers need to go into the database to get rid of email attachments when users request it.

Tiffany

[Adam Marshall]

Attachments are actually stored in resources, it's just that the folder isn't browsable. To illustrate this, try removing read access for students at the root folder level and you'll see that attachments won't be visible to them.

Regarding Ck edit, there's some way of serialising an image and 'storing' it within the <IMG> element. Maybe there's a plugging / option to enable this feature? That would get around a heap of problems.

Adam

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[Daniel Merino]

Since I can remember, CKEditor always have had an option to paste an image as a chunk of bytes. No property is needed AFAIK. If the image is too big the size limit of text will be exceeded and an error will be shown, but it works for small images.

Just copy an image in any image viewer (Windows, Linux)  or image edition tool (Paint, Gimp...), right-click on CKEditor and select "Paste". A popup is launched where the image can be copied with CTRL+V. HTML view shows the chunk. Not too readable and with size limits, but it works in 11.4 and I am pretty sure that it worked too in 10.5.

<img alt="" src="data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAnEAAAHECAIAAADZAOs0AAAAA3NCSVQICAjb4U/gAAAgAElEQVR4XuydB4BU1dX4501507ayhSpVERE7imBPjCXtS4+mfYmJibEbjfniP8VoYowxRWOMSb4YjYldo7FEPzsoIIoIiILSYVnaLtumvTcz7/87976ZnV0W2MWFLPAew9uZV+6797xz7unnGo7j+LzNg4AHAQ8CHgQ8CHgQeN8Q8L/vFrwGPAh4EPAg4EHAg4AHAYGAx1M9PPAg4EHAg4AHAQ8C
(...)

By the way, testing this I have just learned that a "file://" url is also allowed in CK Editor, thought obviously it will only work in user's computer. Not useful but it's curious.

<img alt="file:///home/dmerino/Escritorio/krabby.jpg" src="file:///home/dmerino/Escritorio/krabby.jpg" /></div>

HTH

El 18/10/17 a las 10:36, Adam Marshall escribió:

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[Matthew Jones]

Yeah, we had a project a few years ago to create an Image plugin that would do this base64 encoding for all images uploaded rather than storing them. This was to work around some issues around how Samigo did image sharing. This method has some downsides but could be worth it for student images.

- As you mentioned a size issue, for small jpgs this is fine but not all text areas in Sakai have the same size and some of them are limited. Also Antisamy also has a limit (currently 1MB but previously 100KB). 

- Base64 encoding increases the size of the image data by about 30%.

- There was a performance issue for encoding large images anyway mostly on encoding, and took minutes on a computer a few yeas ago. So realistically somewhere over 1MB is about the limit to this anyway.

Cool idea though.

[Tiffany Stull]

Hi all,

I apologize for my incorrect assertion that making student work publicly available would be a FERPA violation.  In reviewing the FERPA requirements, the law only pertains to personally identifying information - so as long as the students' uploads didn't include any content that would identify their person or location, it would not be a FERPA violation to expose them.

However, I still think it inappropriate to expose student submissions publicly without their consent, and it could be a copyright violation depending on the copyright of the uploaded item in question.

Tiffany

[Matthew Jones]

The way students can share files through the Browse Server now isn't ideal. (Because there really isn't an obvious way) All of the tools you mention do attachments and override write permissions to allow uploading to a special area. This area is only able to be written to during this process and only members of the site can access the attachments folder. Audio Recorder is the only one the students have access to in CKEditor currently. (Now that the equation editor has been removed) It's not brow-sable as Adam mentioned so not really public, someone in the course has to have gotten the link.

I agree that the process should be clear, about what is happening with these resources. Dropbox.com used to have a folder called Public with a README in it. It was clear that anything put into that folder was made public..Anyone with that link would be able to access it. [1] Google Drive has a similar access method. This shouldn't be an issue as long as the students were informed their uploads were going into this public folder by default AND it's the contents are only accessibly to those they give the link to. Copyright and fair use are still different problems and probably relate to how the link was distributed (or not)

Do other LMSes allow for drag and drop of images? I know email clients like Google do, and some other services like Jira do. Jira basically adds it as an attachment to the issue and makes a link to it, so it has the same access restrictions as the issue. But as mentioned other services give access to the link.

It's possible a new class of access "Must be logged into the system" could be created to close the gap from Public to semi-private? Some of these are bigger design questions around resources. It's possible that attachments could also be moved right into the site context and every student given a private (dropbox [the tool]-like) attachments folder. That would also help for issues around copying/reuse. 

It could be nice for the short term of Daniels suggestion of just encoding and embedding works out. There was a plugin for that but it didn't support IE, I don't know if it works or not in Edge.

[1] https://www.dropbox.com/help/files-folders/public-folder