Media Library vs Content Hub

Laura,

The easy answer is to always use the Content Hub. I say this because the Media Library will "go away" forcing you to migrate your media library items to content hub items.

You can also use workspaces to separate your media library items. Create a workspace called Media Library or Images, etc and then you have a better way of organizing the content hub items rather than having everything in the default workspace.

TLDR; don't use the Media Library. We added it to Xperience because the Content hub wasn't mature enough for asset management 2 years ago when Xperience launched. Today the Content hub is 100x better and encourages marketers to do what they should have been doing for the past 10 years - treat their media and assets as content.

We have used the media library for a long time to manage assets and the client is most familiar with the media library.

Thankfully, we have a page in the documentation dedicated to all the features in Xperience for managing assets in the Content hub.

I know the content hub offers a lot of additional features for assets including editing, taxonomy & expanded customization.

This is correct. We also have features for optimization and AI content generation for assets in the Content hub. You can read about the benefits of using the Content hub for assets in our guides on storing content and content modeling.

I am concerned it could result in situations over time when many images are added, the ContentItem tables becoming very large.

Yes, it will become large just like the media library tables in previous versions of Kentico. Did those large tables cause a problem for your Kentico solutions?

We have tested the Content hub with millions of items 😅 and content delivery works just fine.

Also, what about separation of concerns? Having images, documents, and content in the content hub could make it messy.

Assets are content. If things are messy why not organize them?

• Smart folders (using content types and taxonomies)

• Content folders (for more organization control and responsibility)

• Workspaces (to limit content management permissions and access, like AlexG mentioned)

• If you need total control you can even create a "container" content type with content item fields to link and order related items.

Are you trying to convince me that Kentico media libraries never got messy because the media was separate from web pages? That was definitely never my experience 🤣🤣.

As Brenden mentioned, the media library will soon be deprecated and we're shipping a feature in the product to help customers (and partners) migrate media items to the Content hub (on our roadmap for June).

I've migrated our Media Library over to the Content Hub, using multiple Workspaces and migrating the "folder' structure as the content folders.

We have ourselves over 60,000 media assets i think...and i can tell you, it performs very well. Will it be slightly slower than if you had full paths (/mysite/media/etc)? Yes, because you can't beat a direct lookup, but that's hardly sustainable because you can't deploy then.

It probably is comparable in speed to the /getmedia links, as there is little to no difference between them and the /getcontentasset links in terms of lookup. It pulls down and caches images if you use blob storage (I would recommend).

I was at first worried about a bloated content hub, i'm not worried anymore.