What’s in Your Media Library?
Both Lectora® and Lectora® Online include a Media Library and access to characters, stock buttons and images as well as providing a location where you can store and share custom project assets. In this blog we’ll explore the Media Library and learn how taking advantage of this tool for accessing and reusing content can provide consistency throughout your titles and reduce your development time.
To access the Media Library in Lectora or Lectora Online, simply look to the right side of the screen.
The top three side-tabs – Title Resources, My Library, and Stock Library – provide access to the Media Library, as follows:
Title Resources – The assets which have already been imported into your current title
My Library – The library of objects you’ve saved
Stock Media – The installed media for you to access, such as buttons, character poses, clip art, and more.
The Inspire Tools side-tab provides quick access to the tool you recently accessed.
Title Resources
Clicking the Title Resources side-tab will show you all of the media that you have loaded into your title, including:
- Animations
- Images
- Audio files
- Video files
- Documents or other attachments
Lectora desktop displays thumbnail previews of your images. You can expand and collapse the categories to see all of your title resources.
Lectora Online displays your Title Resources within a drop-down list. Hovering your mouse over an image will also display a thumbnail preview.
Title Resources will include any unused assets: media that you have imported but which does not yet reside on a page and is not referenced by an action. Lectora and Lectora Online do not delete these unused items so that they remain available to you whenever you decide to use them. Unused media will not be published with your title, so you don’t have to worry about inflating your title upload size. And of course you can always remove any unused media—individually or collectively—by using the Resource Manager.
Your Media and Library Objects
Lectora and Lectora Online allow you to save any media into your library so that you can reuse it again and again, saving you time and ensuring consistency from course to course. For example, suppose you want to save your company’s logo so that you can use it in all of your titles.
Using Lectora Desktop: In Lectora Desktop. select the My Library side-tab. If you’d like to create a special folder for your media, click the Add Category button and name the folder. Open the folder and click Add File. Browse for and select the file and your logo is now saved and available to you every time you open Lectora.
You can share your custom media with others. When you right-click on an asset—or any object in the Media Library—you’ll see the option to Show in Windows Explorer. Selecting this opens your Windows file structure to where Lectora stores the object. From here you can copy/paste the file into a shared network repository, or even attach it to an email.
Using Lectora Online: To save your logo file In Lectora Online, select the Media Library side-tab. The Shared Media folder will be selected by default. If you’d like to create a special folder for your media, click the Add Folder button and name the folder. Click Add Media. Browse for and select the file and your logo is now saved and available to you and everyone else in your organization.
Another type of media you can save is Library Objects. Library objects may contain any content in your title. This includes individual objects such as an image, button or action, as well as full pages, sections, chapters and tests. You can even select multiple chapters. To create a library object, you begin by identifying and selecting the desired content in the Title Explorer.
Once you have selected the desired content, right-click on the content and select Save as Library Object. You can now reuse this content within any title, or share it with your colleagues. For more information on creating and sharing Library Objects, check out last week’s blog: Reusing Content with Library Objects in Lectora and Lectora Online.
Stock Media
Lectora and Lectora Online come with pre-loaded media assets including buttons, characters, Flash Activities and clip art. You can find these in the Media Library in Lectora Online* or the Stock Media side-tab in Lectora.
*Note: the Stock buttons in Lectora Online can be accessed only from the Insert ribbon.
Lectora Desktop’s Stock Library also includes a Media Online folder. This folder provides access to additional resources including:
- Live Model Gallery: hundreds of images of male and female characters in professional, casual, medical and industrial attire, as well as silhouettes for use on both light and dark course backgrounds.
- Theme Stock Buttons: the Back, Next, Home, Help and Exit navigation buttons from all of the Design ribbon Themes, plus additional buttons for Print, Audio and more. There’s even a “blank” so that you can create your own button to match a theme!
The Live Model Gallery is also included in Lectora Online. You can find it within the ClipArt folder.
Along with the Resource Manager, the Media Library in Lectora and the Stock Library in Lectora Online provide great information and access to the media in your titles and make it easy to save and share assets across titles and developers.
This article last reviewed Dec, 2015. The software may have changed since the last review. Please visit our Release Notes to learn more about version updates.