How Media Bridge works

This page explains the concepts behind Media Bridge. You don't need them for day-to-day work, but they help you understand what you see on the pages, and what happens during a migration.

Storage sources

Each company has one active Media Storage Source:

Storage source	Where pictures live
Tenant Media (default)	In the Business Central database, like standard Business Central.
External File Storage	In the file account assigned to the Media Bridge file scenarios, for example an Azure Blob Storage container or a SharePoint library.

You cannot change the storage source by hand. It changes only when a migration finishes without failures: the target of that migration becomes the active storage source. This guarantees that the storage source is only switched when all pictures are really there.

Records that have pictures

Media Bridge manages pictures for these kinds of records. The documentation calls each of them an entity.

Entity	Picture	Page
Item	One picture per item	Item Card
Item Variant	One picture per variant	Item Variant Card, and the carousel on the Item Card
Employee	One photo per employee	Employee Card

More entities (for example Contact, Resource and Customer) can be added in later versions without changing how storage works.

What happens when you work with a picture

flowchart TD
    U[User adds, views or deletes a picture] --> M[Media Bridge]
    M --> Q{Active storage source}
    Q -- Tenant Media --> T[(Business Central database)]
    Q -- External File Storage --> X[(File account)]
    X -. file path, type and date .-> R[Stored on the record]

Add a picture : Media Bridge writes the picture to the active storage source. With External File Storage, it keeps the file path, the picture type (MIME type) and the upload time on the record. The picture itself is not stored in the database.

View a picture : Media Bridge reads the picture from the active storage source. If the picture only exists in the other storage source, for example for a record that was not migrated yet, Media Bridge reads it from there, so it stays visible until it is migrated.

Delete a picture : Media Bridge deletes the picture from the active storage source, and also from the other storage source if a copy was left there. This prevents an old copy from appearing again.

Delete a record : When you delete an item, item variant or employee, Media Bridge deletes its external file too. If automatic orphan clean-up is on (Tenant Media only), it also removes media that no record uses anymore. See Clear orphaned media.

Supported picture formats

Media Bridge accepts JPEG, PNG, GIF, WEBP and BMP pictures. For drag and drop, Media Bridge checks the file contents, not only the file name, so a renamed non-image file is rejected.

Where external files are stored

External files are organised in folders by company, entity and the first two characters of the record number. See Storage layout for the full structure.

One company, or several

By default, each company manages its own pictures. In an environment with several companies, you can let one company serve the item pictures for the others. See Multi-Company.