Knowledge base - Images and the Image library

[SRegier]

We are just starting to manually copy our articles from Zendesk to ServiceNow. I recommended that my team copy and paste the source code from Zendesk to ServiceNow and make adjustments needed. This method does not transfer the images, which is fine; we have them in repositories on our work OneDrive and just add them back in using the insert/edit icon. We are not pasting in our images.

This is a customer-facing knowledge base, and we use a lot of screenshots in our procedures. My question is, do we have to upload the images to the image library, or is this optional? At this point, I only recommended we use the image library if we had other attachments (PDF, DOCX, XLS) that we want visible to the customer, and we do not want our screenshots listed.

What should we be doing? I would like us to do it correctly from the beginning instead of backtracking. Most of our screenshots/images are unique to that article and not reused. 

Thanks - Sherri

[Lauren Methena]

Which is why it's a best practice to add images to the library first and add them from the library rather than paste them in (which the system then treats them like attachments). 🙂 There's no way around that one - and it does save a lot of heartache later if you have to copy/paste HTML coding, etc.

[Allen Andreas]

Hi,

Do you have documentation or a reference for that best practice?

There are numerous situations where the platform team doesn't want to give every article author access to the image library and some articles won't have attachments that you need "display"...so I've yet to see that any time you're using images it's best practice to use the image library.

Unless, your context was...if you plan to display/have other attachments and don't want those images showing in your displayed list, then use the image library. Which I'm guessing it was since now I see that that was what this thread was about, haha.

[Lauren Methena]

Pasting images is just sloppy overall and usually leads to extra work on the back end for people entering the articles and leads to potential issues (such as interfering when articles need to "display attachments"). 

Having code that goes to an image in the image library is cleaner. It also means you can re-use images instead of having to paste them into multiple articles. 

When working with article updates, I've seen the logistics of having to edit or move an article be complicated because of attachments in general. (i.e., I have re-attach the attachment, so this goes for images as well as docs). 

When an article has an image that comes from the image library, I just have to copy/paste the HTML source code, and then the image in the article comes through with the source code - no extra step of having to hunt down the image and paste it/attach it in the article I'm working on.

That's been my experience. I can see your point about the image library. However, issues of access can usually be negotiated. The image library is definitely the way to go in most cases.

[Allen Andreas]

Hi,

Thanks. I don't agree with the statement about it being "sloppy", but to each their own.

I was hoping to see some sort of documentation towards it being a best practice, if you happen to have that, surely let us know 🙂

Access is a critical piece of evaluating what option to use and the fact that you have to give image_admin for people to even use it or customize things to allow them access is debt as well.

However, in this context here, since there are attachments they plan to display, then yes, the image library would be the most likely option to go with.

[Allen Andreas]

Hi,

Thanks for the that clarification 🙂

Yes, if they plan to use "display" attachments on specific articles, then yeah, they'd have to use an alternate method, like the image library.

I supposed my confusion got in the way there and I missed that otherwise I wouldn't have mentioned the other methods of bringing in images, haha.