Enhances the Media Library; powerful gallery and list shortcodes, full taxonomy support, IPTC/EXIF/XMP/PDF processing, bulk/quick edit.
| Last updated | October 28, 2026Updated in the last 3 months |
|---|---|
| Tested up to | WordPress 7.1.4Covers WordPress 7.1.4, the current release |
| Needs WordPress | 5.3.0 or newer |
| Needs PHP | 7.4 or newer |
| First published | August 13, 2012 |
| Support, last two months | 7 of 8 threads resolved (88%) |
4.8 / 5 from 202 reviews
| 5 stars | 185 |
|---|---|
| 4 stars | 8 |
| 3 stars | 2 |
| 2 stars | 1 |
| 1 star | 6 |
The Media Library Assistant provides several enhancements for managing the Media Library, including:
• Complete support for ALL taxonomies, including the standard Categories and Tags, your custom taxonomies and the Assistant’s pre-defined Att. Categories and Att. Tags. You can add taxonomy columns to the Media/Assistant listing, filter on any taxonomy, assign terms and list the attachments for a term.
• The Media/Assistant admin screen displays more attachment information such as parent information, file URL and image metadata. Provides many more listing columns (more than 20) to choose from. You can also add columns to display custom field values.
• Provides additional view filters for MIME types and taxonomies, and features to compose custom views of your own.
• Inline “Bulk Edit” and “Quick Edit” areas; update author, parent and custom fields, add, remove or replace taxonomy terms for several attachments at once. Works on the Media/Add New screen as well.
• Works with the popular Admin Columns plugin for even more Media/Assistant screen customization.
The opening of the plugin's own description. The full text, installation notes and changelog are on its WordPress.org page.
You can add support for many attachment metadata values such as file size by visiting the Custom Fields tab on the Settings page. There you can define a rule that maps the data to a WordPress custom field and check the “MLA Column” box to make that field a sortable column in the Media/Assistant submenu table. You can also use the field in your [mla_gallery] shortcodes.
The powerful [mla_gallery] shortcode supports almost all of the query flexibility provided by the WP_Query class. You can find complete documentation in the Settings/Media Library Assistant Documentation tab. A simple example is in the preceding question. Here’s an example that displays PDF documents with Att. Category “fauna” or Att. Tag “animal”:
Yes! The [mla_gallery] shortcode supports all MIME types when you add the post_mime_type parameter to your query. You can build a gallery of your PDF documents, plain text files and other attachments. You can mix images and other MIME types in the same gallery, too. Here’s an example that displays a gallery of PDF documents, using Imagick and Ghostscript to show the first page of each document as a thumbnail:
Yes! You can activate or deactivate support for Categories and Tags at any time by visiting the Media Library Assistant Settings page.
No! The Assistant supplies pre-defined Att. Categories and Att. Tags; these are WordPress custom taxonomies, with all of the API support that implies. You can activate or deactivate the pre-defined taxonomies at any time by visiting the Media Library Assistant Settings page.
Yes. Any custom taxonomy you register with the Attachment post type will appear in the Assistant UI. Use the Media Library Assistant Settings page to add support for your taxonomies to the Assistant UI.
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Read from the WordPress.org plugin API on , when WordPress 7.1.4 was the current release. WordPress.org rounds active installs into buckets. These are the directory's figures, not my verdict, and I haven't tested this plugin. The author takes donations at their donate page.