In SAP Commerce Cloud, the Media Management Framework is a set of tools and features that help you manage and manipulate media assets in the e-commerce platform.
It provides a centralized system to store, organize, and deliver various types of media, including images, videos, documents, and more.
Your business can use this framework to streamline media-related operations, enhance the user experience by optimizing media delivery, and efficiently manage digital assets throughout the e-commerce lifecycle.
Media Item: Definition, Metadata, and Relation with the Media File
Let's start with the media files we're uploading to SAP Commerce Cloud. They're usually organized relative to the products they belong to. However, the files themselves are not stored in the database. What’s saved in the database are media items that reference media files. More precisely, a media item contains a URL which points towards the physical file.
Each media item has a unique ID, its identifier. For example, in the diagram below, the media items with IDs 30124_medium and 30124_thumbnail are present.
Each media item is assigned to a catalog version and can therefore be synchronized across catalog versions.
That’s not all, though. We might use the same media item in different contexts. A product image, for example, may be viewed on a widescreen computer monitor, a tablet or a phone. That means, the same image is needed in different formats and different resolutions. Their identifiers help you quickly distinguish between them: In the diagram below, the media item 30124_medium references the file 30124_medium.jpg, and the media item 30124_thumbnail references the file 30124_thumbnail.jpg.
A System View of the Media Item
The 30124_medium media item is shown as an example from the Backoffice Product Cockpit.
So, how do we exchange images easily depending on the circumstances they are viewed in? That is done using media containers, which contain media items and their metadata.
Relation Between Media Item and Media Container
In SAP Commerce Cloud, each media item has one media format associated with it. For example, 1200x900, thumbnail, widescreen, and so on.
The media format is merely a tag; it does not follow that the item has a particular size, but rather indicates its intended use. For example, a small image could be tagged as a thumbnail, indicating it should be used when displaying lists of products.
A Media container contains one or more media items, each of which contains a specific variation of an image. Optionally, conversion can be configured for a media container. You will learn more about media conversion in the next lesson.