export const meta = {
  title: "Make your media easier to recognize and share",
  description: "You can now choose the thumbnail that best represents a file, keep a video looping while you review it, and embed shared media in more places. Your iPhone also shows more of what is happening elsewhere in your library, including uploads from another device.",
  slug: "2026-08-07-make-your-media-easier-to-recognize-and-share",
  date: "2026-08-07",
  draft: false,
}

## New features

- **Choose your own asset thumbnails.** You can now upload a custom thumbnail, capture a frame from a video, or use a page from a document to represent an asset. You can reset the thumbnail later, so your library can reflect the image that makes each file easiest to recognize.
- **Keep a video on repeat.** You can now turn on looping from the video player controls when you want to review a clip repeatedly. Your loop preference carries across videos, so you do not need to enable it again every time you open another file.

## Improvements

- **Embed shared media in more places.** You can now use an Aspect share link with publishing tools that support oEmbed to create an embedded viewer. Your embeds also report their media dimensions to the host page and avoid showing an unwanted background while the viewer loads.
- **See uploads from another device on your iPhone.** You can now see live upload progress in your iPhone’s asset viewer and thumbnails even when the upload started on another device. This helps you tell whether a file is still arriving before you try to review it.
- **Open shared files directly on iPhone.** When you open a link to a shared asset on your iPhone, you can now go straight into its viewer. You can begin reviewing the file without first navigating through a shared folder listing.
- **Adjust sort direction more easily.** You can now change the sort field and its direction from a clearer combined control. The direction choices open as part of selecting a sort, making it easier to switch between the orderings you need.
- **Keep using file actions during an upload.** You can now open the full file menu while an upload is in progress, with the upload controls placed at the top. You can reach other available actions without waiting for the upload to finish.
- **Find more relevant search candidates.** Your searches consider a broader pool of possible matches before choosing the results to show. This helps relevant content make it into the final results when your library contains many similar candidates.
- **Return from a share to your workspace.** When you open a share while signed into your Aspect account, you can now use the workspace home button to return to your workspace. You have a clearer route back to your own work after reviewing a shared item.
- **Preview larger office documents.** Your larger or more complex office documents have more room to finish converting into previews. Document indexing also handles stray control characters from PDF text more reliably, reducing failures that could keep a document out of content search.

## Bug fixes

- **Use share templates as a limited member.** If you are a limited workspace member, you can now view the share templates available to you when creating a link. You no longer lose access to those templates solely because of your membership type.
- **Start offline and recover desktop mounts more reliably.** You can now start the desktop drive service in offline mode when no sign-in token is available and use content already available locally. Startup and shutdown also handle stale processes more reliably, reducing duplicate services and mounts left behind after you quit.
- **Retry interrupted saves and preserve newer content.** Your mounted drive retries more temporary connection failures instead of leaving a write stuck. It also handles additional temporary-file and replacement patterns used during editing, and older remote updates no longer roll a newer save back to earlier content.
- **Keep mount permissions consistent with downloads.** When you create or update a share that allows mounting, it must also allow downloads. This keeps the share’s settings consistent with a mounted workflow, where another application needs to read the file’s content.
- **Refresh shared-link previews sooner.** When you update a share’s title or preview information, those changes can appear sooner when another service fetches its link preview. Aspect keeps that page information cached for less time, reducing how long an older preview can persist on its side.