Image and Media Best Practices

Question

I am looking for suggestions on Best Practices for D8 and files / media entities. I originally added this as a answer but kiamlaluno evidently felt that it should be a new question in itself so here goes.

I trying to figure out the best way to handle files and media entities. With the increase of development in the file entity module if appears that things are once again getting way over complicated since files can now be a full blown entity. In my opinion this is going to put a lot of people off as to which way is the most practical way to go.

What I would love to see is a tutorial or a write up on best practices of when to use the file field versus the media field and the pros and cons of each. Drupal 8 by default gives us a Article content type which is a file entity. So should we use this for images or delete it and use media fields.

Does anyone know of a recent tutorial or discussion for review?

Answer 1

Use media_entity. End of discussion.

People are actively working on getting it into core and once that happened, there is no reason to use file_entity anymore.

We (as in me and @slashrsm/MD Systems) will continue to minimally maintain it, as we have a number of big sites (a distribution actually) that relies on it, but it will most likely never get out of alpha while media_entity is already stable.

We're actively blogging about the status and progress on getting media into core:

• http://www.md-systems.ch/en/blog/md-systems/2017/01/09/current-status-of-media-in-drupal-8-core-and-next-steps
• http://www.md-systems.ch/en/blog/md-systems/2017/01/30/media-initiative-is-official-and-we-are-one-of-its-leading-parts

Answer 2

Of course, the topic is still evolving, but as of the latest Drupal core (8.6.x), Media is indeed now included, and has come a long way since its D7 roots.

Although there's still a lot to be added, documentation on it does exist. Another advantage of going with Media is that images, files and other assets are more easily reusable, as well as not tied to specific content nodes, making syndication and content migrations easier. (@Berdir, et.al., please correct me if I'm in error).

As @pthurmond notes, it probably is only good if starting a new site. On that, I can speak from experience, relaunching a D7 site as D8, which was completely rebuilt from the ground up. May be worth it for some cases, but could be a monumental hassle, at least at the moment, if migrating an existing large site to the Media Entity paradigm.