How to Create a Media Assets Library for Your Agency

As a business owner, organizing your media assets becomes challenging as your agency starts to grow. One way to keep everything organized would be to create a media assets library.

This way, your team members will have all of the media assets available to them in a centralized hub. You can also secure it so it’s accessible only to authorized staff members.  

In this guide, we’ll take a look at what a WordPress media assets library is and how you can create one for your agency in a few simple steps.

What is a media asset library?

Before we jump into creating a media assets library for your business, let’s take a step back to see what a media assets library actually is and how it helps businesses stay organized.

A media asset library is a hub for all of your brand’s media assets. These can be images, videos, ads, logos, and banners.

Most agencies don’t have a centralized hub for their media assets which can potentially lead to mismanagement. It makes it difficult for marketers to quickly find a specific image or video they need to post.

By creating a media assets library, you can stay organized. This way, finding media assets of different sizes and formats that you might need for specific placements – like for Instagram Stories or Facebook banners – becomes easy and hassle-free.

You can also download multiple media assets in one go from your media assets library which is particularly useful if you need access to a set of media assets. For example, if you need your brand logo and the latest promotional ads for an email marketing campaign.

Having a WordPress media assets library is important for agencies looking for a way to better manage their media assets for different channels such as social media, digital marketing, and PR.

How to create a media assets library in WordPress using Filr

Filr is a WordPress plugin that lets you build a media assets library for your agency.

You can use it to create a clean table layout listing all of your media assets (along with download links) for users. The plugin lets you upload individual files or multiple files to your media library at a time.

Here’s what you need to create a media assets library in WordPress:

• A WordPress website
• Some media assets (like images, videos, or media kits)
• The Filr plugin

Step #1: Install the Filr plugin

The Filr plugin for WordPress enables users to upload media assets to their website and display them on the front-end in an organized way. In addition to this, it also provides additional features like file encryption and file expiration which help prevent unwanted access to your organization’s media assets.

The first thing you need to do is get the Filr plugin and install it on your WordPress website. Once it’s installed, click the Activate button to get started.

Step #2: Create groups for your media assets

By creating groups for your media assets, it makes it for users to find what they’re looking for. As an agency, you might consider creating groups named PR, Social Media, and Digital Marketing to sort and keep track of all of your media assets.

So, for example, if you need to replace an ad you posted on your Instagram business page, you will find the relevant material under the Social Media group you created. 

To create a new group, go to Files > Libraries from the WordPress admin panel. Enter a name and description for your group and click the Add New Library button to continue. It will appear on the right-hand side of your screen along with a shortcode that lets you display all of the files sorted under that library on the front-end. For now, copy the shortcode to your clipboard.

Step #3: Add your media assets

The next step is to start adding media assets to your WordPress site.

To do this, go to Files from the WordPress dashboard and click the Add New button. Give your file (or files) a name and upload the media assets using the File Upload meta box.

Once that’s done, organize your media asset files to the appropriate group using the Lists meta box on the right-hand side of the page.

Finally, click the Publish button to proceed.

Step #4: Publish the media assets library

Now that we’ve uploaded all of the media assets, we can publish the media assets library on the front-end.

Go to Pages > Add New from the WordPress dashboard to create a new page. Next, we’ll use the shortcode we copied to our clipboard. Add a new Shortcode block to the text editor and paste the shortcode in it. Click the Publish button to publish your media assets library on your WordPress site’s front-end.

It will look something like this:

Users will be able to see and download all the files by clicking on the file name under the Download column in the table.

Filr lets you change the style and colors of your WordPress media assets library. Head over to Files > Settings and click on the Shortcode tab to customize the media assets library.

You can also publish multiple libraries on a single page. All you have to do is paste the shortcodes of the groups you want to publish in the text editor. It might look something like this:

After successfully publishing your media assets library on your WordPress website using the Filr plugin, you need to secure your media assets so that only your team members have access. 

The easiest way to do that is by using Passster – a WordPress content protection plugin. Passster enables you to restrict access to your content in a variety of different ways including password protection, CAPTCHAs and reCAPTCHAs, role-based access control, and unlocking via a link. Check out the 6 Different Ways to Restrict Content in WordPress for step-by-step instructions. 

So, when an authorized user accesses the media assets library, they’ll be able to find what they’re looking for and download it to their machine.

Wrapping up

By creating a media assets library for your agency, you can make it easy for marketers and team members to quickly find what they’re looking for. You can organize them based on the types of media assets you create or your marketing strategies.

The easiest way to do this in WordPress is by using the Filr plugin.

Using Filr, you can create a WordPress media assets library in four simple steps that users can access and download media assets from – individually or in sets.