Livingdocs Release July 2026: Media Center
Every other month, we at Livingdocs release an updated version of our product wherein we expand its functionality with new features, capabilities and improvements. Now, our July 2026 Release is live and ready for users to explore.
Media Center: License Profiles
Every image in a newsroom arrives with conditions attached. An agency photo may be licensed for web only. A freelancer shot may be billed each time it is used. Some images may only be published once per channel, or only in the context of one particular story. The terms live in contracts, they are often cryptic or scattered, and no editor can carry every agreement in their head. Breaking them exposes a publisher to legal and financial risk.
License Profiles capture a contract's terms in structured form and attach them to the image. A profile defines where an image may be used, for example web only or web and print, and on which billing terms. While researching and placing images, editors see licensing indicators and can filter by license. At publication, Livingdocs enforces the rules, so a placement that would violate the license does not go out. That safety net makes more of the image pool usable for every editor, not just licensing specialists.
Some licenses are too complex for fixed rules. For these cases, a profile can require approval. Using such an image raises an approval task on the document, and the image desk reviews it before the document can be published.
Because images and license information live in the same system where stories are written and published, Livingdocs can enforce license terms across the entire image lifecycle, from import to placement, publication and billing.
Media Center: Billing Reports
In the May release, we completed the Usage Log, the permanent record of every image publication. What was still missing was a way to turn thousands of individual usage entries into something your accounting department can work with.
Billing Reports close that gap. License Profiles state whether a usage is billable, for example on a pay-per-use freelancer contract, and the Usage Log records where and when each image was published. Image dashboards can now be filtered for images that require billing within a chosen time period. The result can be exported in a flexible format, for example as a per-photographer report, ready to hand over to accounting.
Media Center: Advanced Search
Finding the right image starts with search, and until now text search in the Media Center lagged behind document search. Compound German words were not split, and there was no way to search for an exact phrase.
With this release, Media Center search matches document search. It handles search terms in the language of each metadata field, covering German, English, French, Italian, Spanish and Norwegian, and splits German compound words such as „Dampfschiff“ into „Dampf“ and „Schiff“ for better results. Exact phrases can be searched with quotes, and wildcards are supported. A help icon in the search box opens a cheat sheet documenting the full search syntax, so the capabilities are discoverable right where you need them.
Further improvements in the July 2026 Release include:
Thumbnails in the image search now show at a glance whether a picture is already in use and under which license profile, and long descriptions can be trimmed to a few lines so results stay compact.
For newsrooms using the Retresco integration, tags that Retresco considers main entities are now visible in the editor, and users can override them.
When a document is copied, for example into a print version, the document inbox is carried over to the new document, so images researched for the web article are right there for print.
Inbox items normally disappear from the inbox once they are placed in the document. Teams that prefer to keep them can now switch this behavior off.
Breaking Changes & Upcoming Deprecations
In order to keep Livingdocs as streamlined and user-friendly as possible, we periodically remove features when we have found better solutions to the problems they solve. We will always give you ample notice so that you have plenty of time to make adaptations to your setup.
In the July Release, there are some technical breaking changes you need to be aware of as a technician working with Livingdocs. No user-facing features are affected. Please read the Technical Release Notes for a comprehensive list of changes that may affect your newsroom.
To get more in-depth, technical information about this release, please refer to our documentation site. There, you can also stream the recordings and peruse the slide presentation of our Feature Webinar.
We look forward to showing you what’s in store for our next release!