Admin Columns allows you to manage and organize columns in the posts, users, comments and media lists in the WordPress admin panel. The Pro version also includes addons for browse lists for 10 popular plugins (e.g., Gravity Forms, Advanced Custom Fields, WooCommerce, Yoast, SEO).

For me, the Pro version was a no-brainer.

Use Case for Managing Media Library

Admin Columns Pro: Custom browse view that includes a larger thumbnail. (Click to enlarge.)

The pro version of this plugin is especially useful for managing media. Here’s how I used it with a client who has many photos:

1. I created multiple browse views, one of which was “verbose”, listing lots of columns. While this view was useful for me, the developer, it was overkill for the client. So I created another “compact” view which displayed only a few key columns.
2. Using the inline-editing feature in conjuction with the bulk-editing feature, we could assign media categories and media tags to multiple images at one time. (The site uses FooGallery Premium for displaying galleries based on media categories and tags.)
3. We used the inline-editing feature to add and edit image captions from the browse list. The FooGallery gallery was configured to display these captions. It was so much quicker and easier to edit captions from the browse view rather than having to view each image singly.
4. While the media library displays a default thumbnail image in list mode, that image is often too small (it’s only 62 px wide) — especially when multiple images are similar. So I added a new field to one of the browse views: an image field using the 150px X 150px image size. (See screen capture.)

Other Useful Features and Use Cases

• Sorting on just about any field
• Advanced Filtering
• Saving Filters so they can be invoked with a click of a mouse
  For example, for the Web site reference above, we created a filter for “Media without captions”. This allowed us to declutter the browse list so that we’d see (and be able to edit) only those images that had no captions yet.
• Imagine you have dozens (or hundreds or more) posts whose “Comments” value has been set to “Closed” and you now want to open them for comments. Bulk edit makes it a breeze.