Get a specific media asset

A media asset is part of a collection of assets or files representing an image or a piece of audio content like an episode or an ad. Images, for example, have differently sized versions for better rendering performance, and a piece of audio content usually comes in different encoding formats.

The style attribute of a media asset describes the role an asset plays in the context of the collection. The collection is what an asset is attached to (attachment_id|type).

Styles for Images

Most media assets use square images. You may upload and use a square image, or upload an image of any shape and crop it to a square by specifying the cropping area. This area – identified by a coordinate x, y and a width & height – is the portion of the image used for all cover art. If an image has cropping defined, the cropped version of the image will be used in any regular or square style of media asset. If the original file is rectangular and does not have cropping, then the system will use a squared version of the original file with the smaller of width or height as the square size.

The original image as uploaded into the system is always retained unmodified and available through the style original. All media asset styles except stripped-original consist of the cropped image.

An image has media assets with the following styles:

• original: This is the original file provided. May not be available, depending on permissions and file type.
• stripped-original: The original file with all metadata (EXIF, XMP, PNG metadata, etc.) removed. This should be used for any application needing the original, uncropped, image.
• regular: If the image has cropping defined, this is the cropped image. If not, this is a square version of the original.
• thumb: A square thumbnail of the image with a size of 100x100 pixels.
• square-400: A square version of the image with a size of 400x400 pixels.
• square-640: A square version of the image with a size of 640x640 pixels.
• square-888: A square version of the image with a size of 888x888 pixels.
• square-3000: A square version of the image with a size of 3000x3000 pixels. This variant is only created if the cropped width & height are each at least 3000.
• itunes: A square version of the image with a size of 1400x1400 pixels.

Preferred image used in feeds

For the main series image used in feeds, it is ideal to use the square-3000 version. If that is not available, the itunes version should be used instead.

Styles for Audio

• medium: A medium-quality version of the audio asset in various formats.
• original: This is the original file provided. May not be available, depending on permissions and file type.
• waveform_data: The generated BBC Audiowaveform data in JSON or binary format.