Macula.Link — A command center for all your content
Get your content seen, not stolen. Stress-free asset management for creators: securely store, share anywhere, track performance & see who’s using your multimedia.
For the past few months, we’ve been tirelessly working on building and improving Macula. In today’s blog post, we’re going to give a big overview of the cool things you can do now, along with how to get started and what plans we have for the future. Let’s go!
Get started with Macula.Link in 5 minutes
The first thing is, obviously, creating an account. Head to https://app.macula.link/login/, click “Send magic link”, and follow the link you receive in your email inbox. Done!
A wise next move is to add a few words about yourself along with links to your social profiles. You can do that right after signing up or at any later moment by clicking the profile picture icon in the top right corner and selecting “Settings”.
If you suddenly feel lost, look for the “Explore free features” unfolding menu in the bottom left corner. It’s your little to-do list for getting started with Macula.
Now go to “Files”, click “Upload” and drop some files in! Once uploading is finished, go back, click the three dots on the right of the file you want to share, and select “Publish”.
Optionally, fill in the fields, select the license, and click “Publish”. No need to bother about the rest for now. Click the “Preview link” button and — ta-da! — admire your freshly published picture. 🎉
This may look simple, because it is! But, in fact, Macula has done a lot of things in the background:
- Generated a new version of the image using a preset and saved it, connecting it to the original.
- Updated the metadata of the new copy with the title, description, and keywords.
- Embedded licensing information and Web Statement metadata into the file.
- Generated an SEO-optimized webpage with image information, licensing details, and links to your social profiles.
Not bad for a few mouse clicks, right? But even so, we’ve only scratched the surface of what you can do with Macula. Let’s dig deeper!
The “Why”: Macula’s philosophy
Being a visual content creator can be equally fulfilling and daunting. When the market is already so saturated and you have to wear many hats all the time, you naturally want to focus more on what brings the most value. Macula is meant to fit seamlessly into your workflow, taking over mundane (but still important!) tasks like managing copyright details, creating multiple renditions of an image, and sharing them quickly, without compromising on attribution or protecting your intellectual property.
We believe that any piece of content is a valuable asset and should be treated as such. To produce high-quality content, you invest a lot of time and effort, expecting that sharing it will gain you exposure, followers, or clients. Are you willing to sacrifice attribution and put up with freebooters taking advantage of your work just to get some visibility? With Macula, you don’t have to put up with anything. When sharing via Macula, you remain in control, deciding who can reuse your content and how (on what terms).
Not only that, but content also has a natural lifecycle, which doesn’t end when it is shared with the world. A big mistake many creators make is just watching the stats for a while after posting, and then forgetting about their work completely. Macula adds a missing link by making reusing, remixing, and retiring content an effortless process.
Read more about the “Macula way” and content lifecycle in our “Unlocking the hidden value of your content” series: Part 1: Content is an asset and content lifecycle Part 2: From content shed to content factory Part 3: Scaling beyond with Data Sources
The “How”: Macula’s box of tricks
Despite being simple on the surface, Macula packs a lot of different features, covering multiple steps of the creative workflow, from uploading the first image to executing content-centric marketing campaigns and monitoring their performance.
Uploading, managing, and backups
This is the starting point in the journey of any piece of content. Macula allows uploading any file format, providing rich support for many of them. Get a direct link and share anything, even documents and HTML files. Enhance your images with on-the-fly editing and optimization, enjoying beautiful SEO-optimized pages for your images and videos.
Macula uses a private IPFS network for fault-tolerant P2P replication, rendering dedicated backup solutions irrelevant. If your file is on Macula, it’s going to stay there, safe and sound, for as long as you want it. You can learn more about IPFS in Macula here.
Try it for yourself by uploading different media formats and seeing what Macula can do for you!
Image editing and transformations
Move faster and spend less time context-switching with Macula’s image editing engine, which combines a familiar image editing experience with flexible on-the-fly transformations. Macula makes each piece of content infinitely reusable in any context with zero additional effort.
Pick an image you want to edit and click the “New transformation” button. From there, you can specify the parameters, such as height, width, compression, format, and others (more coming soon!). To check the end result, click “See preview”. Once you’re satisfied, click “Save transformation”, and voila! The new transformation is now saved neatly alongside the original file, ready to be shared with the world (or with specific people).
Transformations are edited copies that carry over all the details, copyright information, and metadata of the original file. This allows you to always have the original intact and make more copies when needed.
Getting bored from doing all of this manually? Enable on-the-fly transformations! You can do that when sharing an image. This makes it dynamically editable with special parameters added to the URL.
Learn more about how on-the-fly transformations in Macula work
Sharing and analytics
At the heart of Macula’s sharing engine are Universal Links (or UniLinks for short). They automatically determine how to serve a piece of content depending on who requests it and how they want it to be presented. With UniLinks, you have two ways of sharing: a direct link or a UniLink Preview page. When sharing a file, you can pick the option you need from the drop-down menu.
The direct link is exactly what it says on the tin. You can send it to someone, embed it into a blog or website, or share it on social media (this post talks about why you might want to do that instead of uploading images everywhere).
UniLink Preview pages take a bit more explanation. UniLink Preview is an SEO-optimized web page with information about the file and its licensing details, as well as embedded metadata and a Web Statement for search engines and web crawlers to understand the licensing terms. In this way, you get a simple but functional portfolio for all your files and a Google Images Licensable badge as a bonus!
Tip: You can get to UniLink preview for any file by adding
/at the end.
Here’s how a typical UniLink Preview page looks:
It’s nice to have a little “portfolio” for each image, but if only there was a way to combine all of them on one neat page… Wait, there is a way! Every Macula user has a public page filled with all published files that are split into three categories: images, videos, and all the other formats. You can find your public page by clicking on a profile picture and selecting “Public profile”.
Here’s an example of how my public page looks. And remember, it took zero time to make it. All I did was publish individual images (which I was going to do anyway), and now they are all here.
But wait, there’s more! I can already hear you say, “Publishing each image is a lot of work! It’s boring!” Don’t worry; you can publish not only files but whole folders too! Create a folder, drop some files in there, and hit the “Make public” switch. Lazy slackers rejoice!
All files inside the folder will be automatically published and added to your profile. Plus, each of them will have individual links for sharing with all the benefits we mentioned before: SEO, metadata, and copyright details.
Read more about Universal Links and sharing in our documentation.
Want to know how different content performs? Just pick the file and head to the “Stats” tab to see a detailed log including origin, UTM, browser, OS, and more. Looking for some precise details? Click the “</>” button to get a full entry in JSON format that can be used for aggregating statistics or evaluating marketing campaigns.
Data Sources
If you’re looking for something more advanced, we’ve got you covered too! Data Sources are one of the core mechanisms that make up Macula’s sharing engine. They not only take care of delivering the actual files but also allow you to do some pretty cool magic tricks when building websites or apps.
There are two Data Source types available: Binary and JSON. The Binary Data Source is used when you need the actual file. It is also responsible for applying on-the-fly transformations before serving the image. It’s activated automatically when no file extension is provided. JSON Data Source returns information about the file in JSON format and is activated by adding .json at the end of the file URL. This information includes details about the creator, file copyright, file format, and other fields generated by Macula, as well as the original file metadata (e.g., exposure and location info for images and so on).
JSON Data Sources allow you to do a lot of fun things with your images. Here’s a very quick and simple example:
Here we first use the Binary Data Source to load the image itself, and then use the JSON Data Source to display its title and author. Don’t worry if you don’t understand this stuff; you don’t need it to use Macula!
This is just a basic example, but in reality, the only limit is your imagination! Read more about Data Sources and things you can do in our documentation.
Macula and licensing
Protecting copyright is a big part of Macula’s philosophy. We believe that creatives should not compromise their intellectual property when looking to boost exposure and visibility. Macula automatically embeds licensing metadata into each shared file and its transformations so that both humans and machines alike are aware of the terms you choose for your works.
As of today, you can pick any of the latest Creative Commons licenses or set “All rights reserved”, with more custom options coming later. You can also set different licenses for each individual transformation, which gives you even more freedom when deciding how you want various versions of your works to be used.
Looking forward
We have come a long way from the original idea of Macula to where we are now. Still, there are a lot of things we plan to do. Macula stands on top of several years of experience building tools for creatives, and it doesn’t exist in isolation. The ultimate vision behind Macula is to become a part of the Kelp ecosystem, combining Anagolay, a process-based P2P property rights network framework, and Kelp Marketplace, a decentralized marketplace for a new creative economy, enabling creators to grow and monetize their work on their terms.
Even so, Macula already has a lot of things to explore so hop on this journey together with us and start sharing On Your Terms!
Get started with Macula’s fully-functional free plan today and see the benefits for yourself! Sign up here (no trial, no credit card required)
If you want to become a tester, or just share some thoughts, please reach out to us: join our Discord, reach out on X/Twitter, or simply email us to hey <at> macula.link.
To see what’s already in the works, you can always check Macula feature roadmap. That’s also where the functionality requests and suggestions we get from you will appear.
