Release details

These are the final release notes.

Media Optimization (IO)

Media Optimization (IO) enables you to crop, resize, sharpen, change transparency, or rename images on the fly via embedded links while the original remains untouched in Picturepark.

This release introduces a new media editor, currently for images. Permitted users can access the media editor from the Content Item detail view or from within an embed. Users can use this feature to create and download optimized images for webshops, websites, landing pages, social media, or any other purpose.

The media editor allows you to dynamically make advanced transformations and image optimizations without changing the original. You can see the results instantly in the preview on the right. You can execute various modifications and validate your results by enabling or disabling them, and you can also chain everything together for multi-layered optimizations.

The following optimization actions are available:

• Crop, resize, rotate, sharpen.
• Alpha channel transparency (replace).
• Conversion into JPG, PNG, or TIFF.
• Rename the default filename for SEO purposes.

When used as an embed link, website managers can directly reference images from Picturepark without storing them in another environment, such as an e-commerce store or Web CMS. Picturepark supports the above manipulations via the visual image editor or by changing the URL. If this is not permitted, changing editors can lock the settings in the URL from further manipulation.

When using embed links for media optimization, we highly recommend using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) such as Fastly CDN to ensure high-performing and reliable 24/7 global delivery.

You can also access all media optimization features via dedicated image conversion API endpoints.

Example Embed Links 

All transformations are applied dynamically on the original file. We just changed the cropping rectangle and its position with the parameters in brackets, which you can see in the URL of the files. You can change the crop values or remove them completely to see the original file.

Automation for Lists

Business Rules for lists enable you to, for example, update lifecycle information, send notifications, or export data when items of products, events, or your taxonomies change.

This release now also brings Business Rules to list items, previously limited to content items. This yields new capabilities, such as:

• Create numbers for product lists, such as for creating unique product IDs.
• Send notifications when list items are created or updated. You can notify a user or users of a specific user role when somebody creates or modifies a product, event, collection, or simply a tag.
• Run business rules for list items on a schedule. For example, validate list items daily and flag them when they expire or other criteria apply.
• Trigger service providers (integrations) when list items are created or modified, such as when exporting content to third-party systems.

Additional real-world use cases include:

• Inform your webshop when product items change via a service provider.
• Remove product items from your webshop when modified and not yet approved via the service provider; inform your product managers that these products require approval.
• Update product items in your webshop via a service provider.
• Add list item numbering following a company naming convention using business rule sequence numbers, e.g., product numbers or inventory numbers.
• Inform your legal department when consent agreements of your employees and partners expire.

Much more is possible; please contact a Picturepark consultant to review your use cases.

The Business Rule executes actions for a single list item, not for the list. Activities such as creating or moving list items to other lists are not supported currently, but we added the feature request to the roadmap.

In the configuration for Business Rules, you find the new scope for list items. Be aware that the visible conditions and actions are not filtered, so you will see conditions and actions that are not available for list items. If applied, Business Rules will skip these from execution.

Audit Information in Business Rules

Furthermore, audit and owner information is available in Business Rules. This change permits such business rules to access information about the owner, the creating and last modifying user, together with the dates, supporting new conditional business processes, such as:

• if a European agency user imports content, notify the global content manager group.
• if your taxonomist (identified by email) tags data, then automatically mark it as “final.”
• if the creating user has not tagged newly created content or list items after some days, send a reminder notification.

You can access the audit information via a variable $$audit$$ under transformations, e.g., extracting a single value and then looking up this value in a list to find a matching tag or further transforming the value. The supported audit information includes:

• created by user information (name, email, status)
• creation date and time
• modified by user information (name, email, status)
• modified date and time

Share Page Customization

The share page serves as a landing page that enables other users to view and download content items you have shared with them via Picturepark. The customization settings of this share page have now been extended.

This release allows customization of the share page. This page serves as a landing page where your users find shared Content Items for viewing and downloading.

• You can customize how the thumbnails are displayed; so if you want to have a grid or a list.
• You can disable or enable the terms of service that your users have to accept.
• You can disable or enable the cookie consent, so if your users allow cookies, they will be saved in the user’s browser.
   

These settings are available for the share page and the new embed page, which we introduced as an overview for all embedded images. Some limitations apply to the embed pages, for example. To prevent undesired embeds, embed links are not available from this page. See the embed page with images from the Picturepark company excursion here: https://demo.preview-picturepark.com/s/vqDwuVhY.