Drupal comes with very basic support for file management, which is not powerfull enough for most of the sites. We have various very interesting solutions in contrib. Almost every one of them solves some problems, but it also fails with others. It sometimes feels that we'd get an excellent solution if we'd merge them all together. Unfortunately we can't, since they are not integrated at all.

Drupal 8 is coming at our door and I think that this is great timing to re-think file management. We can see where we succeeded and where we had problems in D8/D7 contrib. We should discuss and decide how to tackle file-related problems in D9/D8 contrib.

I'll present the current state in this field and my view about what is to be improved along with some suggestions how to do it.