Announcing beta.20 - Media Library

When building pages and adding digital assets to a Strapi project, it’s very convenient to keep everything organized and readily available in a Media Library. This was a highly requested feature. Today, we are thrilled to announce that it is now available in the latest release of Strapi beta.20. Let’s take a closer look at the capabilities of this new feature.

The Strapi Media Library allows content editors to manage a variety of media assets including images, videos, audio files, PDFs, or GIFs so that they can be easily reused into their content.

First and foremost, we would like to congratulate awesome community members for their contributions. A big thanks and shout out to @yacir and @VasylRishko for making this release happen!

What type of files can be managed?

As you open the latest Strapi version, you will see that the Files Upload has been replaced by a Media Library. The files that can currently be uploaded and managed by the Media Library are the following file types: images, documents + audio files and videos.

By default, Strapi allows you to sort and filter in Strapi by date, type or size, which is quite useful for projects with a high number of assets. An embedded video player built into Strapi is now available to make video files work out of the box.

Managing Media

The Media Library allows you to upload, edit and delete media files. It also allows editors to insert media uploads directly when editing content-types, and edit them on the fly.

1. Uploading Media

To upload media files to the Media Library, navigate to the Media Library page in Strapi, and follow these instructions:

• Click the “Upload assets” button
• Select a media file or multiple media files to upload from your computer. You can also drag-and-drop your file(s) to upload in the upload pop-in frame.
• Or you can upload an image directly from an URL.

You can also upload media files by dragging them from your desktop onto the Media Library. Give it a try!

2. Editing Title, alt-text and captions

The asset detail modal window offers great control over your asset and improves efficiency for content editors.

Directly from this view, you can rename the file name easily and add an alternative text and a caption.

3. Editing the image on the fly

This feature will be very useful for content editors in a hurry, that needs to edit pictures on the fly without doing it through using another software.

From the same asset details modal, you can also edit your picture, by clicking on the crop button. After selecting the desired part of the picture, you can choose between cropping the original asset, or duplicating it and cropping the new asset. This choice is particularly useful when you are in a content type and editing an asset used in several different ways.

4. Configuring advanced features in Strapi Settings

By default, the Strapi Media Library will enable size optimization without quality loss and multiple responsive formats (small, medium and large). Simply go to settings to enable these options and make your images work across many devices and channels.

Upgrade to beta.20

A fully detailed migration guide is available. The changelog is also available here.

If you are new to Strapi, just give it a try!

Take a look at the Getting Started guide to jump on board, or get started with the following command line:

1yarn create strapi-app my-app

What else in the latest Strapi releases?

Strapi is rapidly evolving and to offer you a comprehensive recap about what's been new in the latest releases of Strapi, we are organizing an Online Meetup Thursday, April 23rd 2020 - 5:00 PM (CEST).

In this Online Meetup, Virginie Ky (Frontend Engineer) and Alexandre Bodin (Engineering Lead) will first introduce the new features included in the latest Strapi releases: Single Types, UID field and Media Library! They will then do a demo of these features, discuss Digital Asset Management best practices and the pros and cons of different options available in Strapi. Finally, they will answer all the questions you might have about these features and how to best use them for your respective projects.

Register below!

Get involved

Check out our public product roadmap to see what features we'll be working on next.

Don't see a feature you'd like in the backlog? Feel free to submit new feature requests or even better, start contributing to Strapi on GitHub. All contributions and users are welcome!

Thanks to Unsplash and to Mae Mu, Micheile Henderson, Olena Sergienko, Tyler Nix and Vadim Sadovski for their awesome pictures we used to illustrate our Media Library.