In reply to Sarah Gooding.

It's true, Sarah, that Admin-nav sux. I had some regret, neglecting your basically right-on core-point, to firstly counter the suggested medicine of infinite scroll, slash, defend the utility of pagination.

Maybe like the offspring who find their Parent's intelligence mysteriously increasing over the years ... Admin-conditions are not near the adversity they used to be, for me. It used to be eg, like in Jeff's recent post, that Meta-boxes bothered me. Now, I have several times as many Meta inputs (doctors offer plugin-therapy now, but I've refused treatment), and the big run-on page full of them doesn't bother me at all.

Let me mention Genealogy. I got to re-know Dad, as he taught me our family tree. (He was a pre-PC Home Computer-based business operator, and gravitated into genealogy software.) There's over 5,000 names and nearly as many relationships in our GEDCOM. All navigation is via drop-down text-boxes. Five thousand names etc in one ridiculous list.

There is something like the Qwerty keyboard-effect at work here. Or maybe it's an organic Binary Search. But what is plain is the fingers know about how far to jerk the scroll-bar, to drop you ... it's bizarre how often the target-name is among the dozen or so in the box.

So I'm in WordPress-admin, and picturing baggy-pants duffers and blue-haired ladies wingin' through much larger data-sets than most websites, and with nothing like the data-management sophistication, scarcely even aware that what they're doing should be hard ... and in fact drives their computer & Internet-betters up the wall.

One of my last Admin hostile-frontiers, is the Media-library interface example you use as a success-story. It's true I have a slow connection ... but the fact is, infinite scroll wants to load-up a gob of images I have absolutely no interest in looking at ... 'cause all I want, is to have it upload my one little post-pic.

Point #2, which may be more noticeable on a slow connection, is that "infinite scroll" ... like the old Saturday Night Live show-opener joke that "This Program has been pre-recorded - because we couldn't figure out any other way to do it!" ... so-called infinite scroll is doing something very like paginating (and disruptively). If pagination is so-yesterday, why is our infinite-presentation device essentially recreating it?? ;)

Lastly (for now), why oh why is a space & room-intensive UI like Media coming up in a dainty new-age Dialog Box? Why are we using a subset of the screen, divvied up into tiny postage-stamp content-boxes to navigate .... Matt's 10s of thousands of photos? Ugh.

Forget both pagination and unhinged scrolling ... let's have the Media tool be half as smart as our grandparents' genealogy program.