Build, curate & share a Media Mix

Goal: create a Media Mix, add photos and videos to it from a client's existing galleries and collections, arrange them, and share the public link.

Prerequisites

  • Media Mixes turned on for your company — Settings → Features → Enable Media Mixes. See What are Media Mixes for the full switch walkthrough.
  • A client with at least one photo already uploaded to a gallery or one video already uploaded to a collection — a Media Mix only pulls from media that already exists.

Creating a Media Mix

From your admin sidebar's Media Mixes list, click New Media Mix and fill in:

  1. Media Mix Name and an optional Description (for your own reference — visitors don't see the description).
  2. Client — which client this Media Mix is for. This can't be changed later; the item picker is scoped to this client's own galleries and collections.
  3. An optional Cover message shown on the Media Mix's cover, and Show cover image to toggle a hero banner on or off.
  4. An optional Cover image upload — JPEG, PNG, GIF, or WebP, up to 10 MB — or, once the Media Mix has photos in it, pick one of those photos as the cover instead. An uploaded image always takes precedence over a picked photo. The photo picker only appears on the curation screen's Edit Details tab, once you've added at least one photo.
  5. Allow downloads and Disable right-click — see Downloads & protection below.
  6. An optional Password and a Link expiry (7, 14, 30, 60, or 90 days, or no expiry).

Saving takes you straight to the curation screen — a new Media Mix starts as a draft and isn't visible at its public link until you publish it.

Clients with My Media Mixes turned on can create their own from the client portal, using the same fields minus the client picker (it's automatically their own account). See What are Media Mixes for the two switches that control this.

Curating: adding photos & videos

Opening a Media Mix (from the list, or right after creating one) lands you on the curation screen's Items tab, split into the current Items in this media mix tray and an Add photos & videos picker below it.

  1. In the picker, expand a Photos or Videos panel to see that client's galleries or collections, each opening into a thumbnail grid with checkboxes.
  2. Check the photos and/or videos you want, from as many of that client's galleries and collections as you like — a Media Mix can mix items from several sources. Click Select all photos or Select all videos at the top of either panel to check everything available at once, instead of opening each gallery or collection individually.
  3. Click Add selected. The button shows a running count of your current selection, and appears both above the picker and again below it, so you don't have to scroll back up after selecting from a long list.

Items already in the Media Mix show their checkbox pre-checked and disabled in the picker, so you can't add the same photo or video twice — "Select all" skips them too.

Curating: ordering & removing items

Every added item appears as a row in the Items tab's tray, in the order visitors will see it:

  • Drag a row by its handle to reorder it. The new order saves automatically.
  • Each row has its own Downloadable checkbox — untick it to hide the download button for that one item without affecting the rest of the Media Mix.
  • Click Remove on a row to take that item out of the Media Mix. This doesn't touch the original photo or video — it stays exactly where it was in its gallery or collection.
If a photo or video is later deleted from its source gallery or collection, it quietly disappears from every Media Mix it was part of — there's no broken link or error, just one fewer item.

Downloads & protection

Two levels control whether a visitor can download something from a Media Mix, and both must allow it:

  • The Media Mix's own Allow downloads switch (on its Edit Details tab) — the master switch for the whole Media Mix.
  • Each item's own Downloadable checkbox, in the Items tab's tray — lets you make individual photos or videos view-only even while downloads are on for the rest.

A video also still respects its source collection's own downloads setting — see Publish & downloads — on top of both Media Mix-level checks.

Disable right-click discourages casual saving of media directly from the public page, the same as the equivalent setting on galleries and video collections.

Download All

When at least one item is downloadable under the rules above, visitors also see a Download All button that packages every downloadable photo and video in the Media Mix into one ZIP — the same "Download All" visitors already know from photo galleries and video collections, now spanning both media types at once.

If a Media Mix's total downloadable size is over 4 GB, the button works differently: instead of building the ZIP while the visitor waits in the browser, it's built in the background — split into a few parts if needed — and a link is emailed to them once it's ready, the same "email delivery instead" flow large galleries and video collections already use.

The emailed download link stays valid for a limited number of days before it expires. A part may mix photos and videos together, in whatever order they appear in the Media Mix.

Publishing

A new Media Mix is unpublished (a Draft badge in the list) until you click the publish button on its row. While unpublished, its public link shows a generic "not currently available" page to anyone else — but you (or the client, for one they own) can always open Preview from the curation screen to see it exactly as a visitor will, bypassing only the unpublished state, not a password.

Sharing the link

Every Media Mix gets its own public link in the form /m/{token}, shown on the curation screen's Share tab with a Copy link button and a downloadable QR code — the same pattern as gallery and video shortlinks. See QR codes for what to do with the QR image itself.

A password (if you set one) and an expiry date work exactly as they do on a shortlink: a password-set Media Mix prompts a visitor for it before showing anything, and an expired link shows "Link Expired" instead of the Media Mix — the Media Mix itself isn't deleted, so clearing or extending the expiry date brings the link back to life.

Editing a Media Mix later and leaving Link expiry on "Keep current" preserves its existing expiry date — you only need to touch that field when you actually want to change it.

What visitors see

A published Media Mix renders as one mosaic page — visually the same style as a photo gallery — with photo tiles and video tiles side by side in your chosen order. Clicking any tile, photo or video, opens the same lightbox carousel, so a visitor can flip from a still straight into a video and back without leaving the page.

Deleting a Media Mix

Click the trash icon on a Media Mix's row, then type DELETE to confirm. This removes the Media Mix and its item list only — the original photos and videos are untouched in their galleries and collections. Its public link stops working immediately and can't be recovered.

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