Drupal core is a great content management tool with options to give rich structure to basically everything in the system. While Drupal core includes basic file and image support, it is far from what a modern web system should support out of the box for media handling. External media cannot be embedded easily in core and media cannot be reused. But that was the case up until now! With Drupal 8.4.x everything changes as Media has finally been added to Drupal core.

With the joint effort of only a handful of fine developers, the unofficial Media initiative was formed back in NYCCamp 2014. All the hard work resulted in many pain points being solved and the process of media handling was drastically extended and simplified.

In this talk we will discover the niceties that this addition brings us and also look how current contrib modules complement this functionality. By simple practical examples we will show how to set up the most frequently required features and get you up and running with rich media content in Drupal 8.

Topics covered:
Introduction to Media in Drupal 8
Brief history of media handling in Drupal
Media initiative and the media_entity ecosystem
Changes since Media in core with Drupal 8.4.x
Adding images to posts
Reusable images and selection with entity_browser and inline_entity_form
Embedding images in WYSIWYG with entity_embed
Image galleries and bulk upload using dropzone.js
Cropping with Crop API and image_widget_crop
Alternative media sources (Twitter, Instagram posts)
Don’t let the memories of Media in Drupal 7 scare you. With Drupal 8 we can finally build rich and flexible solutions that fit our client’s exact needs. Let’s discover the modern Media world with Drupal 8 together!