MediaMagick

⚠️ DEPRECATED — No longer maintained.

This gem has not been updated since April 2014 (v0.4.3) and is incompatible with Rails 5+, CarrierWave 1+, MiniMagick 4+, and Mongoid 5+. It will not work in any modern Rails application. See Alternatives below.

MediaMagick aimed to make dealing with multimedia resources easy — wrapping upload, association, and display of images, videos, and files into simple model macros for Mongoid-backed Rails apps.

Several hard incompatibilities accumulated over the years:

• Rails 5+ removed render nothing: true, render text:, and redirect_to :back — all used internally
• CarrierWave 1.x introduced breaking API changes (pinned to ~> 0.9)
• MiniMagick 4.x introduced breaking API changes (pinned to ~> 3.6)
• Plupload (the browser upload library) is largely abandoned
• Vimeo API v2 was shut down in 2020 — video thumbnail fetching no longer works
• YouTube thumbnail URLs changed and now require HTTPS
• All embedded iframes use http://, which browsers block as mixed content

Use Active Storage, built into Rails since 5.2. It handles local and cloud storage (S3, GCS, Azure), image variants, and direct browser uploads with no additional gem required.

# model
class Album < ApplicationRecord
  has_many_attached :photos
end

# view (with direct upload)
<%= form.file_field :photos, multiple: true, direct_upload: true %>

For image processing with Active Storage, pair it with image_processing (libvips or ImageMagick).

Active Storage does not officially support Mongoid. Your options:

• CarrierWave 3.x with the carrierwave-mongoid adapter. This is the closest spiritual successor — you write uploaders and mount them on models manually, without the macro DSL this gem provided.
• Shrine — a modern, storage-agnostic file attachment library with a Mongoid integration via the mongoid plugin. Actively maintained and recommended for new projects.

Replace Plupload with one of:

• Uppy — full-featured, actively maintained, supports direct-to-S3
• Filepond — lightweight and easy to integrate
• Native <input type="file" multiple> with drag-and-drop is now well-supported in all browsers without a library

The built-in Video::Parser is broken. Use the oEmbed standard instead:

• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/oembed?url=<video_url>&format=json
• Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/api/oembed.json?url=<video_url>

Both return an embed HTML snippet without scraping or proprietary APIs.

The gem provided two model macros for Mongoid documents:

class Album
  include Mongoid::Document
  include MediaMagick::Model

  attaches_many :photos, type: :image
  attaches_one  :cover,  type: :image
end

This dynamically created embedded document classes with a mounted CarrierWave uploader, a priority field for drag-and-drop reordering, and optional video support via YouTube/Vimeo URLs.

MIT License