Got an email this morning announcing the new Digital Image Editor that runs inside of Joomla.   Very cool!!!  I have only tried the demo on the site, but it looks great.

It's a very basic editor that does simple things like crop, rotate, resize, flip, and apply a few filters. There's a history option so a client can go backwards if they make a mistake. That's really all a client needs to get images on their site. It's definitely not Photoshop -- but it doesn't NEED to be. This is intended for people who want to post a photo directly from the digital camera, then edit the image within Joomla, making Joomla one-stop shopping for posting content and images.

Drawback: it does save the original image and you save the edited version as another file. Downside to this is that your disk space could fill up very quickly with original pictures, particularly if they're straight off a many megapixel digital camera.

There has been some buzz lately about Flash version 10 breaking the media manager in Joomla. This won't be fixed until after 1.5.8 so what to do in the meantime? Since it only affects the media manager in the administrator, at least the problem only affects your staff. Your choices are to either wait to upgrade Flash until Joomla fixes the problem. If it's too late for that, all you need to do is disable the media manager's flash uploader. Go to "Global Configuration/System" and right at the bottom set "Enable Flash Uploader" to no. Who knows? Maybe you'll prefer this setting anyway!

If you would like to know what version of Flash you are running:

 http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=tn_15507

Flash 10 was released with the new Adobe CS4. I'm sure it does wonderful things for Adobe... but it's breaking a lot of Flash-based image uploaders out there, including Joomla's in the Media Manager.

More information on the Joomla site.

Basically, the Joomla team says that they will not be fixing this problem in 1.5.7 or 1.5.8, but will address it after that.  

It is well known that the media manager, fabulous as it is, has a history of quirky and difficult problems. As we moved our sites to our new server, I found another fun one.