Media Library & CDN

The media library stores your images, video, and files, keeps them organized, and serves them quickly. Media plugs into components like Image and Video and into the theme's favicon.

Plan availability

Free with storage quotas. CDN delivery with WebP variants is a paid-tier feature; large video uploads and higher storage are gated by plan.

Organize

• Arrange media in a folder hierarchy. Folders appear as cards in the grid (folders first, before files) as well as in a side rail — open one to browse into it, and use the breadcrumb to step back out.

• Drag and drop to reorganize: drag a file (or a whole selection) onto a folder to move it in, drag a folder onto another to nest it, or drop onto a breadcrumb to move items up and out. Nesting depth and name-collision rules are enforced automatically.

• Move to folder… shows the full path, not just the folder name — Blog / Covers and Press / Covers are two different destinations and the menu says so. The same paths appear in the detail drawer's Folder field.

• Big moves are safe to interrupt. Moving a large selection relocates the stored objects one at a time, so the library keeps working through it and tells you how far it has got. If it cannot finish everything, it reports the real split — Moved 7 of 19 — 12 could not be moved — and leaves the files that did not move selected, so clicking Move again picks up exactly where it stopped. Nothing is lost either way: a file is only ever in one folder, its URL keeps working, and a repeat move of a file that already arrived does nothing.

• Filter by type, date, and size, search, and sort the library.

• Search covers everything you authored, not just file names — alt text, description, tags, folder name and your own custom metadata values are all searchable. Results update as you type, and ✕ (or Esc) clears the box.

  • Wildcards: mock-*-noshadow.png matches a whole family of files. * is any run of characters, ? is exactly one, and a wildcard pattern matches the whole value.
  • Search one field: tag:hero, name:logo, alt:product, desc:landing, folder:brand, or a custom field by key — meta.campaign:spring. Combine them with plain words; everything you type has to match.
  • Phrases: put quotes around anything with a space — "landing page", tag:"black friday".
  • Typos still find things. If nothing matches literally, Aglyn falls back to close matches and tells you it did.
  • The caption under the box always says what was actually searched — the whole library, or how much of it. Typing loads the rest of the library once so the search covers all of it; on very large libraries it searches as much as it can and says where it stopped, so narrowing by folder, type or date gets you the rest.

• Capture and edit metadata in a detail drawer — file name, alt text, description, tags, and your own custom key/value metadata (mirrored onto the delivered object's storage metadata). Bulk-edit tags and folders across a selection.

• Each card has an overflow menu (the ⋮ button that appears on hover) so actions stay tidy. What it offers depends on the file:

  • Copy URL — public files only. Copy temporary link replaces it on a private file, because a private file has no permanent URL to copy.
  • Make private / Publish file — only in the organization library, and only for members with organization-wide access.
  • Download file — always, public or private. See Download the original file.
  • Replace file — images only.
  • Details and Delete.

  Copy URL gives you a full absolute URL on the site's own domain, ready to paste anywhere — including outside Aglyn. The whole menu is hidden when the library opens as a picker (choosing an image for a page, a logo or a favicon): a picker is for choosing, not for editing.

• See per-asset usage: delivery counters load automatically, and a Used on audit runs on demand — click Find where this is used to list every screen, layout, and content entry that references the asset, each a link that opens it.

• Delete from the detail drawer too, right under the usage audit — so you can run Find where this is used, read the answer, and act on it without leaving the file. The confirmation opens immediately and fills the usage warning in as the scan lands, and the message afterwards names the file (or counts and names them, for a selection).

• Undo a delete. The message that confirms a delete carries an Undo button, and pressing it puts the file back exactly as it was — same link, same folder, same tags, alt text and sharing, and any site that was using it starts rendering it again. It works for a whole selection too, so a bulk delete is one button to reverse.

  Undo lives on that message and nowhere else. Once it goes, the file is gone from the library for good, so read the message before dismissing it. Very occasionally Undo will decline — if putting the file back would push you past your plan's storage limit, it says so and leaves the button where it is, so you can free up space and press it again.

• Select a range with ⇧-click: click one card, then hold ⇧ and click another — every card between the two is selected, in the order they are on screen. Works on the card itself and on its checkbox, and un-selects a whole range the same way.

• Deleting keeps your place. However many times you clicked Load more, the files you deleted disappear and everything else stays exactly where it was — so a long clear-out is one pass, not one pass per file.

Tags

Open a file's Details drawer and look under Tags. Existing tags are chips: click the ✕ on one to remove it. Below them is an Add a tag field, with the helper text Press Enter to add. A file with no tags yet reads No tags yet.

The typed tag is folded in when you press Enter — and also when you click away from the field, which is the case worth knowing: the commonest way to lose a tag is to type it and press Save without pressing Enter first, and here that still saves the tag. Nothing is stored until you press Save in the drawer, so a chip you removed by mistake comes back if you press Cancel instead.

A tag is tidied as you add it, not quietly at save time:

• surrounding blanks are trimmed, and a blank entry is dropped;
• it is lower-cased, so Hero and hero are the same tag;
• a tag already on the file is not added twice — re-adding one looks like nothing happened, because it is nothing.

That matters for finding things again. The library's filter chips and the tag: search prefix match the stored tag, so a tag that carried a trailing space used to become a tag no chip could ever match — a file you tagged and then could not find by that tag. Normalising at entry is what makes the chip you see and the tag that gets stored the same thing. The exact caps are in Tag limits.

Upload

• Upload images, video (MP4, WebM, QuickTime), PDFs, ZIP archives and documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, CSV, RTF, plain text, Markdown and JSON). Click Upload media, or drag files straight from your desktop onto the library — dropped files land in the folder you have open.
• Documents and archives are stored and served exactly as you uploaded them — nothing is opened, extracted or converted. Macro-enabled Office files (.docm, .xlsm, .pptm) are not accepted.
• Rename, replace the file behind an asset, and edit images in place. Replace is available from the asset's details drawer and straight from the card's overflow menu.

Size and plan limits

Upload	Cap	Plan
Images	15 MB per file	Every plan
PDFs	25 MB per file	Pro and above
Documents (Word, Excel, CSV, RTF, text, Markdown, JSON)	25 MB per file	Pro and above
Presentations (PowerPoint)	50 MB per file	Pro and above
ZIP archives	50 MB per file	Pro and above
Video	200 MB per file	Pro and above

Any file over 3 MB automatically uses signed-URL uploads, so big files go straight to storage without tying up the console. Folders nest up to 5 levels deep.

Uploads are checked for what they are — but not scanned for malware

Every upload is checked structurally before it is stored:

• the bytes have to match the type the file claims to be, so a program renamed invoice.pdf is refused rather than stored and served from your domain;
• programs and installers are refused under any file type or name;
• a Word, Excel or PowerPoint file carrying macros is refused, including one renamed from .docm to .docx.

A refused upload names the reason in the message that appears in the library, and nothing is stored or counted against your storage.

This is not a virus scan. These checks establish that a file is the kind of thing it says it is; they do not examine what is inside it. A harmful document that is a genuine document of its type will be accepted. Treat files you upload as content you are responsible for, the same as anything else you publish.

SVG uploads are cleaned

An SVG is a document, not just a picture — it can carry scripts, event handlers and references to other sites. Uploaded SVGs have all of that stripped, and the delivery URL serves them under a policy that blocks scripting outright. Your marks and logos render exactly as before; a decorative SVG that relied on embedded script or on pulling an image from another domain will render without those parts.

Storage is metered per site against your plan (Free 250 MB, Starter 2 GB, Pro 10 GB, Business 50 GB, Scale 75 GB, Advanced 100 GB, Agency 200 GB, Enterprise unlimited) — the library's toolbar shows the running total, and the billing page meters it alongside everything else.

Edit images

Edit image, in an image's details, opens the editor: rotate left/right, flip horizontally or vertically, drag a crop (pick a Crop ratio — 1:1, 4:3, 3:2, 16:9, or Free — first to lock the aspect), and set a Max width to downscale. Finish with Save as copy to keep the original, or Replace original to update every place the asset is used at once.

Download the original file

Download file saves the file itself back to your computer, under the file name the library shows — not the storage object's name. You'll find it in two places:

• in the file's Details drawer, beside Copy URL;
• in the card's overflow menu, without opening the drawer.

It works for private files as well as public ones, and that is the point: Copy URL is the wrong tool for a private file (it is hidden there — see Private files), so downloading is how you get the bytes of a private asset out of Aglyn. Behind the scenes the console mints the private file's temporary link per click and never holds it, which is why there is no link to copy but there is always a file to save.

Two things you may see:

• The menu item is absent in the media picker. Pick the file, then download it from the library.
• If your browser blocks the direct save, Aglyn opens the file in a new tab instead and says so. You still get the file; it arrives under the server's own name.

Deliver over CDN

Paid tiers serve media via a CDN with automatic WebP variants, so images load fast and cache well.

URLs are stable

A media URL is keyed to the asset, not to its bytes or its location. That means the link you copied stays correct when you:

• Replace the file — every screen, layout, and content entry that embeds it serves the new image immediately, with no re-linking.
• Move it between folders — organizing your library never breaks a live page.

So replacing a logo across a whole site is one upload, not a hunt for every reference. Links copied before this behavior shipped keep working too.

Page elements point at the asset, not at a link

When you place an image with Browse media, the element records which asset you chose rather than a link to it. You never have to copy or paste a path, and the element keeps working through folder moves, file replacements, and any future change to how we deliver media. Copy URL is still there for pasting a link somewhere outside Aglyn.

You can also type any external image URL into the field by hand — useful for hotlinking an image hosted elsewhere. Images placed before this shipped keep rendering exactly as they did.

When a visitor saves a delivered file, it keeps the asset's original filename and extension, even though the URL itself doesn't carry one — the CDN response declares the name. Download file in the console arrives under that same name by a different route: the console names the saved file from the library's own File name field, so renaming a file in the drawer changes what a download is called.

What the drawer says about delivery

Open a file's Details drawer and read the line with the small dot next to it. It describes this file, and it says one of exactly three things:

Line	Dot	What it means
Served from storage · no CDN, no variants	grey	This asset has no CDN path — a plan without the media CDN, or an asset stored before you had it.
CDN · variants 320 / 640 / 1280	green	On the CDN, with those WebP widths generated for it. The widths listed are the ones this file actually has.
CDN · no responsive variants for this file	green	On the CDN, serving the original bytes only.

The third line is not a fault report. A file has no variants when there was nothing to generate — an SVG, a PDF, a video, anything that isn't a raster image — and also when generation has not run or did not succeed for it. From outside those look identical, so the drawer says what is true either way: there are none right now. An image that stays variant-less after a re-upload is worth a support ticket; a logo in SVG is working as designed.

The line reads the asset, not your plan: a paid plan does not make a line say variants 320 / 640 / 1280 for a file that has none.

Who an asset is shared with

Workspace media is shared across every site by default. The Shared with control narrows that, with the same three choices as datasets — All sites, This site only, or Selected sites…. You'll find it in three places:

• on a single asset, in its details drawer;
• on a selection — tick several files and use Shared with… in the toolbar;
• on a folder, from its ⋮ menu, which offers to apply the same sharing to the files inside it and its subfolders (it names the count, so you know what you're about to change).

A folder applies its sharing when you save it — files keep their own setting afterwards, so moving a file into a "Client A" folder later does not re-share it. Narrowing a file that sites are already using names those sites first and asks you to confirm. Only workspace owners and admins can change sharing.

A new folder starts shared with All sites, so it appears everywhere the moment you create it — or with the site you were working in, if your workspace has been set to make new resources site-scoped by default. If the Shared with dialog ever opens on "Not shared with any site", that folder or file has no sharing stored at all: it is hidden from every site, and any file inside it turns up under No folder there. Pick a value and save to fix it.

In the media picker's Organization (shared) tab, a site sees only the assets it may use. An agency's internal artwork stays out of the client sites' pickers entirely.

Sharing controls discovery, not secrecy

Sharing decides which sites may find and use an asset, and stops the CDN serving a restricted asset to a site it isn't shared with. It does not make the bytes secret: anyone holding a delivered media URL can still fetch it, because that URL is public and cacheable by design — that is what makes the CDN fast.

Treat an ordinary media URL as a shareable link. For files that must never be fetchable by someone who simply has the URL, mark them Private — see below.

Private files

Private is a separate switch from sharing, and it answers a different question:

	Question it answers
Shared with	Which of your sites may use this file?
Private	May anyone fetch these bytes at all?

A private file:

• has no public URL — the normal media link does not exist for it, and Copy URL is hidden on it in both the card menu and the drawer,
• cannot be placed on a page; the picker refuses it and says why,
• is viewable and downloadable in the console by people who can already see it, through a temporary link that stops working after about fifteen minutes.

Two menu items do that last part, and they are not interchangeable:

• Copy temporary link (organization library, organization-wide members) puts a fifteen-minute link on your clipboard — for handing to one person, once, now. Nothing in Aglyn renews it, so it is a trap in a document or a page: what you paste stops working while the page still looks fine.
• Download file saves the bytes. Aglyn mints a fresh link for that click, so the expiry never reaches you.

Copy URL being hidden rather than disabled is deliberate: there is no permanent address to hand over, and a copied link that 404s is worse than no button.

That expiry is the point. A normal media URL, once shared, works forever and there's no way to take it back. A private file's link dies on its own, so a link pasted somewhere it shouldn't have been is a short problem instead of a permanent one.

Use Private for things that aren't website assets: a signed contract, unreleased artwork, an embargoed announcement, anything with personal data in it. Don't use it to keep an image off one particular site — that's what sharing is for, and marking it private will just stop the image working everywhere.

To publish a private file later, turn Private off. It gets a normal URL from that moment on.

Reference

The details behind the screens above, for anyone wiring media into their own code.

Variant widths

Aglyn generates WebP variants at 320, 640 and 1280 pixels wide when an image is uploaded. Those three are the whole set — there is no arbitrary resizing service behind the CDN URL.

Add ?w= to a CDN URL to ask for one: …/api/media/cdn/org:{orgId}/{mediaId}?w=640. A width the asset does not have generated is not an error and not a resize — the original bytes are served instead, so a ?w=200 request answers with the full-size file. Check the drawer's delivery line to see which widths a given file has.

?download=1 on the same URL makes the response save rather than open in a tab. Both parameters are read after every access check, so neither widens what is served, and both are part of the cache key, so they cannot bleed into each other.

Tag limits

Tags are stored lower-cased and de-duplicated. A tag longer than 40 characters is dropped, and a file keeps at most 20 tags — entries past the twentieth are dropped rather than replacing an earlier one.

Over the API

Media is read-only over the REST API: file names, sizes, dimensions, tags, folders, and both URL forms. See the Media API resource, including what it does not return.

Components

• Image — place and bind images from the library.
• Video — embed uploaded video.
• Favicon picker — choose the site favicon from your media.

Everywhere you pick media — the Image and Video components, the logo and favicon pickers, and the organization logo field — the same media picker opens, with This site and Organization (shared) tabs so you can pull from either library without leaving the dialog.

Related

• Bindings
• SEO toolkit (Open Graph & Twitter images)
• Media API resource — reading the library from your own code