I’ve been a Wordpress power user for 20 years and I am working with art, so media plays a really big role on the sites I manage. One issue that always seems to be present is the real problem of trying to update media captions, alt txt, etc en masse.

One cannot simply copy and paste the required info, and move on. For some reason it seems to take an eternity to save these kinds of changes.

I have never come across a physical setup capable of doing this kind of editing without long waits to save or waiting for the system to recover from a hang.

What is it about the way Wordpress interacts with the database that makes this so difficult for it?

Is there any solution?! I mean a real one.

My setups have included:

10-20 years ago:
LAMP with cPanel, hosted by GoDaddy
2gb ram, 1 processor

10 years ago:
LAMP on centOS, hosted in house
raspberry pi 3 model B

10-8 years ago:
OpenLiteSpeed, hosted by AWS
4gb ram, 1 processor, ssd elastic storage

Current:
OpenLiteSpeed, hosted by AWS
M7A - large; 8gb ram, 2 processors, ssd elastic storage

Fresh install
Plugins currently in use to help mitigate some media issues:
CompressionX
Media Library helper - bulk edit

I should note, this same kind of issue crops up when dealing with woocommerce installs that make frequent use of variations. The work-around there, if your site sells from the front end, is to instead use plugins to offer product add-ons inline with the item for sale. This option does not help at all, however, if most of your sales are handled via pos or admin backend order generation.

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Please help it make sense! I am just adding a short line of txt to each media field and yet it behaves as if I was adding a few gb worth of data to each line.

Thank you ☺️