General concepts > Media Area
In the Media Area of your project you can upload, see, edit and organize all your assets.
Each single asset can be seen with its information and edited.
Metadata and smart tags
Each image, when is uploaded, is examined and a set of metadata is exposed in our media area and via the APIs. If it's a picture with EXIF info, we expose those together with other info, such as dominant colors and a set of smart tags that are machine-learning generated.
Asset organization
With a growing set of assets, you might need to organize them. To do that, we offer a few different options.
You can filter on any number of fields with a set of options for each field:
If you have a useful filter that you want to save or share with the rest of the team, you can add it to your "Saved filters":
One way to organize assets that we recommend is to combine filters with tags, both manually added and machine learning-based smart tags, automatically added on asset upload.
You can efficiently tag leveraging the bulk tagging:
And finally you can visualize your assets in various ways, depending on your use case and asset shape. For example, the tabular mode can be very handy to perform operations on multiple assets at once:
Asset management
For each asset, you can specify a set of default metadata such as title and alternate text that can be applied as a default value when nothing else is selected.
For better asset organization you can specify some additional categorization fields, such as notes for colleagues and author/copyright data of the asset:
If you need to add a new revision of an asset, you can simply drag a new version, and we'll replace the asset in every occurrence:
Localization
In case of multiple locales, you are able to set default metadata on a locale basis:
And then override them in place when referencing the asset in a record:
Audio player
If you host/produce audio files, you can use the embedded audio player to listen them:
Image editor
If you need to edit an uploaded image you can now edit in place with a powerful editor that allows you to crop, rotate, apply some predefined color filtering, tweak the colors and apply some basic shapes and text on the picture:
Direct URL Generation
When an asset is uploaded to your media area, you immediately get access to a direct URL to use it wherever you want:
To understand how that URL is formatted based on your upload, we first need to understand how the file name is formatted after the upload:
Underscores or dashes on the beginning or the end of the file are removed
Character accents are removed
All non-alphanumeric characters except for underscores "_" are substituted by dashes "-"
If the file has a wrong or invalid extension in its name, it is replaced by the one matching the file type
The URL then is created using the project ID, an upload timestamp and the newly formatted file name:
https://www.datocms-assets.com/PROJECT_ID/UPLOAD_TIMESTAMP-FORMATED_NAME
To have an overview on all the things you can do in your media area, check out this video tutorial:
