Enable generating of descriptive text when inserting by URL.

[peterwilsoncc]

Is your enhancement related to a problem? Please describe.

WordPress allows for image tags to be inserted by URL, the purpose of this is to allow users to insert an image hosted elsewhere (for example on wiki-commons).

If image processing is enabled to add alt/descriptive text, it's not currently possible to ask the bot to generate the text for a remotely hosted image.

In the block editor, it would be handly to be able to do so -- either for all images or remotely hosted images only.

Designs

No response

Describe alternatives you've considered

No response

Code of Conduct

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[Sidsector9]

@peterwilsoncc I've tried several approaches on this but couldn't come up with a solution.

The URL in the image block is not stored in block attributes. Instead, when the URL is entered, an image element is immediately generated with the URL added to its src HTML attribute. So it stores the HTML in the database.

I tried extracting the block data using parse_blocks and manipulating the attributes using DOM parsers, but couldn't serialise the block again as the HTML was generated client-side.

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Additionally, adding/updating the URL to the core/image block doesn't emit any events either, that we could add a callback to. Do you have any suggestions to this?