Livingdocs Release September 2025: Media Center Enhancements

Enhanced Image Overview

Having essential information readily available when searching for and selecting images is crucial for effective storytelling. To better support this need, we have introduced enhanced configuration options for Media Library Cards, which determine what information appears alongside images in both the Media Library dashboards and the Article Editor during searches.

The most important pieces of information — title, credit and date — are always displayed. Regardless of your specific metadata naming conventions, suitable metadata fields can be mapped to these three core elements. Additionally, a media handle can be displayed to help distinguish between similar images during selection and collaboration with colleagues.

You can also specify additional metadata to be displayed when detailed information is needed for image selection decisions. Various metadata types are supported and presented in a clear, intuitive format. These additional metadata fields can be toggled on or off easily, with your preferences saved for future use.

Please consult our documentation to see the configuration details.

Access Control for Media Assets

Newsrooms require careful management of images and other assets across different roles and responsibilities. To ensure proper governance, we have extended our existing access permission system — previously available only for documents like articles and pages — to include media assets as well.

User group permissions allow you to manage who has access to which assets, as well as their editing capabilities. For example, you can designate who can view specific images and who can modify metadata such as titles, descriptions, validation dates or tags. This enables specialised teams like image editors to maintain consistent and meaningful metadata, while allowing other newsroom staff to search for relevant images for their stories more efficiently. More sensitive operations like revoking and deletion can be restricted to a small group of authorised people in your newsroom.

Support for Multiple Image Types

Images serve different purposes across various workflows and involve different types of users. Image editors, for example, primarily work with photos from agencies and photographers, making it essential to track image origins and usage rights. Visual journalists and infographic creators, however, focus less on licensing details and more on comprehensive image descriptions that support the storytelling.

To cover a more diverse range of image use cases, this release has introduced support for multiple image types. You can now specify which types of images should appear in search results, as well as restrict uploads to particular types. This ensures that only the relevant metadata fields are displayed, allowing users to focus on the information that matters most for their specific use case.

Upcoming: News Agency Notifications

Livingdocs is working hard to give you what you want: Capabilities to handle workflows for News Agencies and Image Agencies within Livingdocs. We are excited to say we are forging ahead and the News Agency capabilities are already gaining traction and strength. Check out what developments have been underway when it comes to News Agency workflow support within Livingdocs.

When working with news agency reports, you can’t afford to miss urgent developments. This is especially critical when you’re on duty and need to respond quickly to breaking news situations.

Coinciding with the timing of this release, we have developed a comprehensive News Agency Notification System. Agency Screens will allow you to control which pre-configured notifications you want to receive. When a matching report arrives, a dialogue will appear with all the essential details from the agency text and relevant associated information. From there, you will be able to quickly create an article with just one click. You will also be able to enable browser notifications for additional alerts.

When you are off duty, you will be able to pause notifications until the next day. This will ensure you won’t miss important news when you return without having to remember to reactivate your settings.

Please note that we will be offering News Agency capabilities as a comprehensive, supplementary package along with Image Agency capabilities, which are currently in the earlier stages of development. We are adopting this approach so that all News and Image Agency workflows are bundled and consolidated in one place in order to serve you best and provide you with the most effective and streamlined solution.

Interested in learning more about the package providing News Agency and Image Agency capabilities within Livingdocs? Please speak to our Head of Business Céline Tykve  about details and pricing.

Further improvements in the September 2025 Release include:

1. Add unpublish information in History View

   The History View provides transparency about article changes, showing when and by whom articles were edited and published; now you can see when and who unpublished an article, as well. This enhancement ensures you can easily track all important changes to your content and know exactly whom to contact with questions about any unpublishing decisions. We have also improved the visual design to make the information clearer and easier to scan.

2. Target length: Support characters and lines 

   When setting the target length for an article, you can now choose to specify length according to either characters or lines; if you specify length according to characters, you can instantly see the equivalent measurement in lines, and vice versa. This can be particularly helpful when transitioning from print-based workflows to a digital-first approach.

3. Task Screens: Reorder task status groups

   We initially designed Task Screens to prioritise 'in progress' tasks at the top, so you can quickly resume your work. However, your feedback showed that this didn’t reflect your workflows properly. Therefore, tasks now appear in a more logical status order: 'to-do', 'in progress' and 'done, thereby creating a more intuitive experience that aligns with how you actually work.

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 September 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. 

We look forward to showing you what’s in store for our next release!