Hi there,
I’d like to propose the ability to rename existing image files directly within the post editor, without needing to reupload them. Many of my images were uploaded before I understood image SEO best practices, so they currently have not-so-great filenames 
. Fixing this would require deleting, renaming locally, reuploading, and manually replacing images across posts, which would be extremely time-consuming for a photography-heavy site (think 60+ images per article, 200+ articles).
As a result, my existing content is effectively locked into these filenames, limiting image SEO and making it difficult to improve older work. This breaks the otherwise iterative nature of publishing and discourages meaningful optimization of past content.
I’ve seen others suggest a more robust media library, which would also be great, but likely a much larger feature to implement. Allowing simple in-place renaming of existing images, ideally with URL handling, feels like a smaller, more immediate improvement that could deliver meaningful value quickly, while still moving in that broader direction.
Thanks!
After a post has been published, the image could start to get linked other places, complicating renames, but while a post is in draft-- and particularly right when an image is uploaded-- it does seem straightforward to offer an option to rename an image.
Besides SEO, it’s also useful for later server maintenance, when you see IMAGE_0526.jpg on the file system and you are wondering what that was.
“After a post has been published, the image could start to get linked other places, complicating renames”
^so personally this wouldn’t matter to me since my images aren’t really linked anywhere so I’d be happy without any URL handling, but I agree that for others it could be more complicated and they’d need to potentially to handle that themselves if not accommodated by the feature.
Nonetheless I think a useful first step would be allowing image name change across both draft and published posts, with the caveat that for already published posts this might harm existing backlinks unless the user deals with it (I guess by configuring redirects?) themselves, so it would be at their own risk or on their own time to manage that. A potential future iteration could then handle that if the demand is there.