Media Styles and Formats

Introduction

After using some transitional ways of handling images during the conversion to Drupal there is now a simple way of inserting images and other types of media.

Media entities

There are media entities which of course hold information about where the file is stored and there are other basic fields such as who owns it and the media type. The basic media types are:

• Audio (not used)
• Document (not used)  - all our existing non-image media is held under the File type whilst Document also seems to handle the same file name suffixes. So this simplifies things.
• File
• Image
• Remote video (not used)
• Video (not used but may be shortly)

There is also the ability to add additional fields and we have done that for the Image media type adding two sorts of field.

• Those to hold descriptive information to help us manage our large set of media and these can be used to help searching for existing images:
  • Media category - a sub type to help categorise items. 
  • County
  • Place name - where we can  tag those related to a particular place 
• Then we have those to hold information we may want to display with the image:
  • Label -This is for adding text under the image. It can also help label files. 
  • Copyright -  so we can document this under images.

Responsive images are the way things are moving forward, and instead of fixed size images the web is now tending to make them responsive to adjust their size according to the screen being used. Many of our images such as static maps do not work well if reduced in size. We do not therefore have all images as responsive.

View Modes

We don't always want an identical screen format for every image but to have a range of them according to circumstance. So there are a set of View modes from which we can choose.

In order to use a specific View mode for an image within the editor, click the 'Edit media' button above the image. In the pop up window the  Display option lets you choose the View mode.

Our view modes are:

• Default - Includes Label and Copyright but no styling changes.
• Media library - used in all the media library management but we don't offer this as a user display option.
• Basic - The same as our initial Default. Provided to make things clearer and guard against any future changes to the default from affecting an individual item.
• Churches - Used for pictures in church nodes. May be useful for large embedded images.
• Embedded file - the Basic option just provides a link to the file, this one embeds the file within the web page allowing you to view it within any other content provided with this node.
• Help Screen Grab - used on most of the help pages to include screen pictures - produces an image a little narrower than the text on a typical screen
• Responsive image wide - A simple responsive image style for embedded images currently using the wide responsive style. Use churches for larger images but using less screen space.
• Responsive image narrow - Uses much less screen space.