Overview: Media Management in Drupal

Drupal’s media management tools, the Media and Media Library modules, provide content authors with drag-and-drop media and asset handling, full WYSIWYG editor integration, and a library of reusable media assets. There’s minimal configuration required to get started, but full control via Drupal’s standard Entity and Field systems for those who need it.

In this tutorial we’ll:

• Provide an introduction to the media system in Drupal and its use-cases
• Explain the Drupal core features that the Media system is built on
• Link to other tutorials that will go into much more depth on these topics

By the end of this tutorial you should know what role the Media and Media Library core modules fill and know whether or not you’ll want to make use of them on your project.

Goal

Provide an introduction to the suite of media management related modules, concepts, and best practices.

Prerequisites

• 2.3. Concept: Content Entities and Fields
• Chapter 6. Setting Up Content Structure

What is media management?

The brief answer is: media management makes it possible for content authors to upload and reuse media assets via a common interface.

The Drupal core Media and Media Library modules provide a drop-in replacement for the Drupal core Image/File field types with a unified interface for editors to upload, manage, and reuse files and other multimedia assets.

Did we mention reusable? For years, one of the more painful aspects of managing content in Drupal has been figuring out how to re-use the image you uploaded to an article last week, but no longer have a copy of on your computer. Over the years there have been numerous approaches to solving this using contributed modules. All of those have helped inform the creation of the new Media and Media Library modules in Drupal core.

In Drupal we define “media” as any resource, probably with a visual element, and its associated metadata. Images are probably the most common type of media on the web. They consist of a file (such as JPG, GIF, or PNG format), which is the part you see. They also hold information like alt text, photographer, and metadata (such as capture date and tags for organizing).

All Media entities have a single canonical source, but your application might display them in different permutations depending on context. Using the example of an image again, a single JPG file could be displayed as a thumbnail on the home page, a large responsive version as the hero image for an article, or in a slideshow with a caption and the photographer displayed.

You can apply this pattern to all kinds of things, not just images. Videos could be an uploaded .mp4 file plus an encoding workflow, the URL of a remote video on YouTube, or on your own internal video platform. Tweets, posts on Instagram, or products on Amazon — anything you might embed into your site’s pages and want to ensure a consistent styling for could be Media entities.

Built with Drupal core’s fundamental building blocks

Much like a traditional digital asset management system (DAM), the Media system in Drupal encompasses creation, indexing, workflow management, version control, and access control — things that Drupal core provides building blocks for already.