Drop It Plugin Brings Gifs and Unsplash Photos to Gutenberg

If you’re writing all your posts in the new Gutenberg editor but don’t want to give up convenient access to your fancy gifs and stock images, the new Drop It plugin has you covered. Riad Benguella, one of the engineers who is working on Gutenberg, created the plugin to offer one-click image insertion/upload from Unsplash.com.

Drop It adds a droplet icon to the Gutenberg sidebar that launches a search form for Unsplash.com or Giphy.com (a feature contributed by Julien Maury). Users can click the “+” sign on the image or simply drag and drop it into the content area.

Drop It seamlessly connects Gutenberg to the Unsplash and Giphy libraries, putting hundreds of thousands of stock photos and gifs at your fingertips while composing in WordPress. In the earlier days of Unsplash, many of the same images were used all over the web, but over the past few years its library has grown to include more than 550,000 high-resolution photos.

Check out this demo to see how how fast it is to search and insert images:

Benguella originally created the plugin for a talk he gave at WPtech Lyon where he demonstrated how plugin developers can make use of Gutenberg’s reusable modules. His presentation and slides explore Gutenberg’s architecture and show how he created the Drop It plugin.

Benguella said the Drop It plugin’s code is a good example of how developers can extend Gutenberg’s UI using “pinnable” sidebar plugins. It also shows how to use the Data module to access and update Gutenberg’s state (data).

In the future, Benguella plans to add more sources for inserting media. He currently has a proof of concept for adding content from Google Docs and will add more depending on contributions from others and his availability to work on the plugin.