The Media module

In previous versions of Drupal, the basic image field type didn't exist by default nor did another facet of image handling—the Imagecache module, which enabled the management of different image pre-sets (thumbnail, large, and so on). As we've seen with the Memo content type, this is no longer the case in Drupal 7, and at least a very basic support for images that already exist.

While there are many ways to build image integration into Drupal, they may all stem from different requirements and also each option should be carefully reviewed. Browsing around over 300 modules available in the Media category in Drupal's modules search for Drupal 7 (http://drupal.org/project/modules) may have you confused as to where to begin.

We'll take a look at the Media module (http://drupal.org/project/media) which was sponsored by companies such as Acquia, Palantir, and Advomatic and was created to provide a solid infrastructure and common APIs for working with media assets and images specifically...