What this lets you do

Every item gallery now includes a built‑in image editor, so you can crop, rotate, touch up, and annotate item photos without leaving AssetBlaze (or AuctionBlaze) and without external tools. The original image is always preserved, you can revert to it at any time, even after saving.

Opening the editor

From the item's Gallery tab:

• Click the ⋯ menu on any image thumbnail and choose Edit, or

• Open an image in fullscreen and use the Edit action from the toolbar.

The editor opens as a full‑screen dialog with your image in the centre and tool panels along the side.

Who can edit: the same permission that lets you upload, reorder, or delete images (items:manage). The edit option is hidden for users without it, and for archived items (which are read‑only across the gallery).

The editor is only available for images that have already been saved to the item — you can't edit images during the initial item‑creation flow. Upload first, then edit.

Tools

The toolbar is grouped left to right by what each set of tools does to the image.

Crop

• Freeform — drag the corners of the crop box to any size and aspect.

• Presets — snap the box to 1:1, 4:3, or 16:9.

Apply the crop to commit it to the preview; you can still cancel or revert the whole edit afterwards.

Rotate & flip

• Rotate 90° left / Rotate 90° right

• Flip horizontal (mirror)

• Flip vertical

Enhancements

Sliders for:

• Brightness

• Contrast

• Sharpness

• Saturation

• Exposure

There's also an Auto Enhance button that analyses the image and adjusts brightness, contrast, and saturation in one click. Any individual slider can be reset, or you can reset all of them at once.

All processing happens locally in your browser — no AI calls, no server round‑trips for the sliders.

Drawing & annotation

Useful for marking up product photos (e.g. "chip on this corner") or hiding sensitive details.

• Arrow

• Rectangle

• Circle

• Pen (freehand)

• Text — click to place a label anywhere on the image

• Blur / cover — paint a region to obscure it (great for hiding serial numbers, addresses, or competitor branding before publishing)

For each tool you can pick a colour and stroke width. Each stroke or shape you add can be undone and redone while you're working.

Note: drawings are baked into the saved image — once you save, individual shapes are no longer separately editable. To change an annotation, revert and start again.

Saving, reverting, cancelling

The actions group on the toolbar:

• Save — uploads the edited image. The new version becomes the active image you see in the gallery, but the original is kept so you can roll back.

• Revert — appears once an image has been edited. Restores the original image and deletes the edited version. (Only available if Revert is currently possible, i.e. the image actually has an edited version.)

• Cancel / close — discards any unsaved changes and closes the editor.

After saving, the gallery thumbnail shows a small edited indicator so you can see at a glance which images have been modified.

How edits are stored

The gallery keeps two URLs per image when edits exist:

• Active URL — what the gallery, item detail, and exports show.

• Original URL — set the first time you save an edit, and never overwritten afterwards.

That means:

• Revert is always possible for any image that has been edited.

• Reverting is final for the edited version — the edited file is deleted from storage. The original is untouched.

• Editing again after an earlier edit creates a new edited version, but the originalUrl still points to the very first, unmodified image. You can always go all the way back.

EXIF auto‑fix on upload (no action needed)

Phones and cameras often record orientation information in EXIF metadata rather than rotating the pixels themselves. Some apps respect that; others don't. To stop sideways or upside‑down photos appearing in the gallery, AssetBlaze now reads the EXIF orientation when you upload an image and rotates the pixels to upright before the file leaves your browser.

This happens silently — there's no toggle, no prompt. The image stored on the server is already correctly oriented, so it looks the same everywhere (gallery, fullscreen view, PDFs, mobile app).

Tips & limits

• Editing is one image at a time. Bulk‑editing several images together isn't supported.

• No filters yet. Vintage, B&W, sepia, etc. aren't part of this release.

• Undo/redo applies to drawing only. Crop, rotate, and slider adjustments don't have a step‑by‑step history while you're in the editor — but the original is always recoverable via Revert after save.

• Mobile screens — tool panels collapse / move to a bottom sheet so the canvas stays as large as possible.

• Storage — both the original and the latest edited version are kept. If you make repeated edits, only the current edited version and the original are retained.

A typical workflow

1. Upload a product photo straight from your phone, it lands upright in the gallery thanks to EXIF auto‑fix.

2. Open the editor from the thumbnail menu.

3. Crop to 1:1 for a clean listing image.

4. Slide Brightness +, Contrast +, hit Auto Enhance if the lighting was poor.

5. Draw an arrow and a short text label to highlight a feature.

6. Use the blur tool over a sticker on the box you don't want public.

7. Save. The thumbnail now shows the edited badge.

8. Months later, if you want the clean original back, open the editor and click Revert.