A minimum fix would just allowing merchants/staff to directly paste in the cdn url into the media pickers so search&hope isn’t even a factor with direct urls so theme’s don’t have to be customized for url setting fields.
If time and budget are being lost, alternative content management process should really be considered. landing page builders, headless cms’s like sanity or builder.io,etc
Though there is supposedly a different CMS feature for shopify in the works don’t hold your breath.
Theme customizations with sane DAM practices including naming conventions are the way to go with this problem. Customizations using custom-liquid blocks, liquid settings for liquid expressions, and|or metafield definitions(mfdefs) to use with dynamic sources.
You don’t want to even have to think about “search” > then pick > then assign > wading through a sea of assets; when the alternative is just config after the initial upload.
This also helps with theme switch over speed.
I.e. with a custom liquid setting and a campaign image named “2022-q2-product-sku-group-laughing.png” you’d enter:
{{ “2022-q2-product-sku-group-laughing.png” | asset_img_url:‘large’ }}
Or more simply have a text box to enter the file name and under the hood that’s put through the asset_img_url hosted files filter.
Or even a very simple url field to paste the cdn url copied from the assets library page.
Or have dedicated mfdefs that the assets are attached to on the resource(product,page,etc) itself; that is then pulled in automatically by the theme, or through choosing a dynamic source.
Not likely to happen anytime soon if at all ever unless some broader CMS changes happen that need this. The visual theme editor and other features will always be an introductory minimal content management experience and I think this is one of those edges that will always be there that indicate when a store has outgrown the shopify’s basic theme editor. Though it’s not hard to imagine something like PLUS enterprise plans getting some sort of way to bulk attach asset storage to stores and bringing their own indexing.
Why it’s not likely: the problem of “search” is indexing:
The free images library is a known singular source of assets, so shopify can create an index of those images to provide a search to everyone accessing the same library.
Meanwhile it’s not likely they are going to build indexes for each and every single individual stores assets for over 1 MILLION merchants stores with varying amounts of images, some with massive assets libraries, to create and maintain and have to keep up to date millions of indexes for millions of different libraries. And all the new feature requests a search feature would be the foundation for.
If time and budget are being lost, alternative content management process should really be considered.
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