Livingdocs Release May 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 May 2026 Release is live and ready for users to explore.
Media Center: Image Collections
Every upload to the Media Library lands in the same search results, mixed with agency feeds and automated imports. However, for images a team curates over time — symbol photos, topic-based selections, recurring visuals used across multiple articles — there was no dedicated home.
Image Collections give editorial teams a new permanent, shared space to organise images beyond the scope of any single article. We recommend structuring collections by team or editorial purpose — a shared symbol photo library, a department team, a specific coverage area — but how you use them is entirely up to you. Within each collection, editors can create groups and sub-groups to organise images as they see fit. Collections themselves do not nest into other collections, which keeps the top-level structure manageable and avoids the kind of folder sprawl that tends to grow unmaintained in shared spaces. Images can be dragged into a collection directly from your file system or an external source. Multi-select and batch actions let editors send, archive, move or remove images in a single step.
Collections can also serve as lightweight workflows: a queue for archiving candidates, a shortlist for an ongoing story, a shared set any editor can contribute to.
Media Center: Usage Log
Licensing compliance does not end when an image is published. Publishers need a permanent, auditable record of every time an image is used, whether in a web article, a print edition or a social media post. That record must survive even if the image is later removed from the article, and it must be exportable for legal or billing purposes.
The May release completes the Usage Log infrastructure in three pieces. Livingdocs now automatically records a usage entry the first time an image is published in a document. No manual action is needed; the entry is created and persists regardless of what happens to the article afterward. A new API lets external systems report their own usages back into Livingdocs. The result is a single, unified history across all channels. Editors can export the complete usage history of any image as a CSV file, ready for a licensing audit or a law case review.
These three packages lay the foundation for the billing and compliance reporting work planned for later cycles. This release builds the ledger; future releases will build structured reporting on top of it.
Media Center: Batch Editing of Image Metadata
When a series of images arrives in the Media Library, they often need the same metadata applied: a category, a credit line, a rights note. Before this release, the only way to do it was to open each image individually, make the change and save. For a batch of 30 or 50 images, that was a significant time cost.
Editors can now select multiple images from the dashboard and edit their metadata fields in a single step. The dialog works the same way as the upload dialog, making it immediately familiar. Fields that differ across the selected images can be left as is or overwritten selectively. This works for images, videos and files.
Media Center: Image Dashboards in the Article Editor
When an editor opens the image search inside an article, the view has always looked the same for everyone. Depending on the content type and editorial role, the tools needed to find relevant images can vary.
It is now possible to define which image dashboards appear as tabs in the article editor's image search. Configurable per content type. The same tabs also appear in image picker dialogs, and Image Collections are accessible through a dedicated tab. The same dashboards already available in the main navigation since January can be reused here. The previous configuration approach remains supported until November 2026, giving teams time to migrate at their own pace.
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 May 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 presentations of our Feature Webinar and Developer Webinar.
We look forward to showing you what’s in store for our next release!