In short
The media library is where every photograph and video posted to a community collects in one place. You can filter it, download from it, send an image straight into the Designer, and clear things out of it. It shows only posts that carry media — text-only posts never appear.
The thing to understand before you tidy anything is that you select pictures but you act on posts. The library lays media out as a grid of individual items and lets you tick them one by one, yet trashing and deleting are recorded against the post the picture came from. Tick one photograph out of a set of four that somebody uploaded together, press trash, and all four go. Nothing warns you, and the count you get back afterwards is a count of posts rather than of pictures, which is why the number rarely matches what you selected.
Looking for My Files? The files you upload to use in Marks, Dynamic Links and playlists, and the files sent to your Secure Upload links, are kept in folders in My Files (Home > My Files in the app; My Files in the web menu). This page lists everything in your account library. See My Files.
On this page
What the library contains
The library belongs to a Mark that has Community switched on. Without that, the page redirects and tells you to enable Community first — there is no empty library to look at.
What it gathers is every post on that community that carries at least one image or video, from members and from you. Posts made of text alone are excluded entirely. This is worth saying plainly because it means the library is not a second view of the posts list; it is a different collection with a different population.
Every picture is served through a signed address that expires, both the thumbnail you see in the grid and the full-size file behind it. Copying an image address out of the page and pasting it somewhere else produces a link that stops working, which is deliberate.
Finding things
| Filter | What it does | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|
| Search | Matches the text of the post | Not the filename. Searching for what a file was called finds nothing |
| Member | One member, or an Owner option for your own posts | Anonymous posts still belong to a member internally |
| Type | Images or videos | Applied after paging — see below |
| Date range | Posted between two dates | Whole days, inclusive at both ends |
| Sort | Newest, oldest, or grouped by member | By member sorts names alphabetically, then newest first within each |
Two quirks of paging are worth having in mind. Pages hold twenty-four posts, not twenty-four pictures, so a page where several posts carried a handful of files each will show considerably more than twenty-four items.
And the type filter is applied after the page has been fetched rather than as part of the search. The page count does not change when you filter, so a community that is mostly photographs will show a video filter with several apparently empty pages and matches further in. If a type filter looks like it found nothing, page forward before concluding there is nothing there.
Selecting pictures, acting on posts
This is the single most important behavior on the page. The grid is made of individual media items, and your ticks are on individual media items, but the actions that remove things are recorded on the post.
There is no way to remove a single picture from a multi-picture post here. If you need one gone and the rest kept, the post has to be dealt with as a whole.
Trash and restore
Trash is a second tab rather than a deletion. Posts moved there leave the community and the album but remain intact, and you can bring them back.
Restoring has a consequence that is easy to miss. A restored post comes back approved. If it was sitting in the moderation queue when it was trashed, restoring it does not return it to the queue — it publishes it. Where a community moderates posts before they appear, restoring from trash is a decision to approve, not a decision to reconsider.
Do not use trash and restore as a way of parking something you have not made your mind up about. Trashing a post awaiting moderation and restoring it later approves it silently.
Downloading
A single item downloads on its own, at full size, with the browser saving it rather than opening it.
For several at once there is an archive download, and it has firm limits:
- Images only. Videos in your selection are ignored rather than refused — select five photographs and two videos and you get an archive of five
- Twenty at a time. More than that is refused outright with a message naming the limit
- Filenames are rebuilt, not preserved. Each entry is named from the date, the post it came from and its position within that post
One more thing to watch: if a file cannot be retrieved while the archive is being assembled it is left out, and the archive is delivered anyway. Count the files in an archive against what you selected before deleting anything on the strength of having downloaded it.
Sending an image to the Designer
Any single image can be pushed straight into the Designer to become the basis of a Mark. It is one image at a time — if several are ticked, the first is taken — and videos cannot be sent.
The format is worked out by inspecting the file itself rather than trusting its address, because image services routinely serve a modern format under an address that suggests something else. Where the format is one the Designer handles natively the file is passed through untouched. Where it is not — WebP, AVIF, GIF — it is converted to a high-quality JPEG first.
That conversion is the only place transparency is lost. A PNG keeps its transparent background because it is passed through as it is. A transparent WebP has to be converted, and conversion puts it on a white background. If transparency matters, supply a PNG.
The hand-off is short-lived and is consumed the first time the Designer page loads. Send the image and go straight to the Designer; if you leave it and come back later, send it again.
Deleting permanently
From the trash tab, a post can be removed for good. This does three things, and the third is the one that catches people.
- The post record is deleted outright. There is no further tab it goes to
- The stored files are removed from Linxy’s own storage. Media that lives somewhere else — an image referenced from another service — is left where it is, because it was never ours to remove
- Print requests for that post are cancelled, including ones already marked fulfilled, because they would otherwise point at files that no longer exist
That third point deserves care at an event. If a guest has ordered a print of a photograph and you permanently delete that photograph, their order moves to cancelled. Clear the print queue before clearing the library, not the other way round.
If any stored file cannot be removed, the operation tells you which ones. This is the one place in the media handling where a failure is reported rather than passed over, so it is worth reading the result rather than dismissing it.
Why the numbers at the top are approximate
The summary figures on the library page are not all exact, and this is by design rather than by fault. The count of media is derived from the number of posts carrying media, because opening every post on every page to count the files inside would make the page slow for no real benefit. Where members upload several pictures at once, the headline figure understates what is actually there.
The count of members who have posted is exact.
Use the figures as a sense of scale. If you need a true count for a specific reason, filter down to what you care about and count the grid.
Symptoms, causes and fixes
| Symptom | Cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Trashing one picture removed several | Removal is recorded on the post, not the picture | Restore the post; there is no per-picture removal here |
| “Affected” is lower than the number I ticked | It counts posts, and your ticks spanned fewer posts | Nothing wrong. Read it as posts |
| A video filter shows nothing | Type is filtered after paging, so early pages can be empty | Page forward before concluding there are none |
| Searching a filename finds nothing | Search reads the post text | Search the caption, or filter by member and date |
| A restored post appeared publicly | Restore sets posts to approved | Moderate it again, or trash it once more |
| The archive has fewer files than I selected | Videos were dropped, or a file could not be fetched | Download videos individually; re-try the missing ones |
| “Too many images” | More than twenty in one archive | Do it in batches of twenty |
| A transparent image arrived on white | It needed converting, and conversion flattens onto white | Supply the same image as a PNG |
| The Designer did not receive the image | The hand-off had already been used or had lapsed | Send it again and open the Designer immediately |
| A guest’s print order was cancelled | Its photograph was permanently deleted | Fulfill print requests before clearing the library |
| A copied image address stopped working | Addresses are signed and expire | Download the file instead of linking to it |
Things people commonly get wrong
Related reading: Uploading media, Collecting guest media, Requesting a print, and Running the print station.