The Media Library is an unlimited storage provided by ImageKit to all its users with a simple user interface to upload, search and manage images, files and folders. It is built on top of the S3 storage provided by AWS and is spread across the globe for better performance and backups for data redundancy.
Why use the Media Library?
There are a couple of cases where using the Media Library can be great for websites and apps.
The Media Library is great for websites looking to upload their images to an external image and file storage. It is not only a reliable, high performance form of storage, but it will also help in saving server disk space if you keep your images and files on the server. Additionally, the user interface that comes as a part of the Media Library, is great for managing and searching your images. This allows even non-technical members of your team to have quick and easy access to the image assets of your website and app.
The other use case where the Media Library can be helpful is for marketing activities. Every company needs to communicate with its users, either via email or notifications or banners. Such marketing activities are usually taken care of by the marketing team of the company. Often, the marketing team needs a quick and easy way to upload new banners or new images to be sent out in emails and get a URL to access them or resize them. The Media Library is perfect for such use cases. The marketing team can create folders for each campaign or activity and keep all the related image and file assets in that folder. Each file is accessible via a secure HTTPS URL and is ready to use in push notifications or emails or a banner on your website.
Where is the Media Library available geographically?
ImageKit has a globally distributed architecture to allow for better performance and 100% uptime. On similar lines, the storage system that forms the basis of the Media Library is also distributed across the globe. The storage is currently distributed in 4 regions - Frankfurt (Germany), North Virginia (USA), Singapore City (Singapore) and Sydney (Australia).
Which region do I get for the Media Library?
The region is automatically selected on the basis of proximity to the country that you select during registration. Performance wise all regions are the same so you need not worry about that. But ideally, you should prefer to go for a region closest to where your users are. For example, if you are based out of the US, but your users are from Europe, you should select the storage location in Europe.
To check or change the region allocated to your account, you can create a support ticket from the ImageKit dashboard.
Are my images safe in the Media Library?
Absolutely. ImageKit's Media Library is built on top of S3 which is one the most trusted cloud-based storage services used by the biggest companies in the world. Additionally, each image uploaded to the Media Library is also backed up in a secondary, geographically-distinct location. For example, all images uploaded to the Media Library for a customer with Frankfurt (Germany) as the storage location, will be backed up in North Virginia (United States). Such backups are enabled for all regions by default. We can use this backup storage in case of performance degradation of the main storage region and also provides you with the ability to restore older versions of an image (this is available only on request).
In terms of availability, while we strive for 100% availability for the Media Library, ImageKit guarantees a 99.9% availability for all functions associated with its Media Library.
To know more about ImageKit's Media Library, please create a support ticket from your ImageKit dashboard.
