APEX Media Extension (AME) Publicly Available

After two months of beta testing, we have released the first production version of APEX Media Extension v20.1.

I'm extremely proud to bring our second product to the Oracle and APEX community.  With our first product, APEX Office Print (AOP), we wanted to make the Printing and Exporting of documents easy.  With APEX Media Extension (AME) we want to make the processing of media easy for any Oracle database and Oracle APEX developer!

We got the idea of doing this product when Oracle Intermedia/Multimedia became decommissioned in the Oracle database, but we still needed the manipulation of images in our projects. We did research on the best use of existing tools, but it always seemed we couldn't rely on any one tool and we needed different tools and custom code to come to a solution.

In our first release of AME, you will find the following features:

• resize images
• rotate and flip images
• crop images
• add one or more watermarks or overlays (images and text) to images
• compress images
• greyscale images
• change image formats (jpg, png, ...)
• get image information (width, height, mime type, ...)
• read media metadata (Exif, IPTC, and XMP)

Just like with AOP, AME also comes with a FREE plan.

You can get started by downloading the software from the APEX Media Extension (AME) website.
The zip contains a PL/SQL API, an Oracle APEX Plug-in, and an APEX sample application.

Here's a short video which shows you AME in action:


The architecture of AME is very similar to the one of AOP. There's an AME Server that accepts REST requests. On top of the REST API, we've built a user-friendly PL/SQL API.
The APEX Plug-in is a bit different, as this plug-in is an enhancement of the Dropzone plug-in by Daniel Hochleitner. We customized the plug-in so the manipulation of the images is done in the browser before the media is sent to the server.

As we love our AOP customers, we decided to put AME in our upcoming AOP release! So when you upgrade to AOP v20.1 (Gold and Enterprise on-premises licenses), you can use AME too without needing to do a separate install :)

Just like with AOP, we will have a separate AME Roadmap and of course, your voice is important to us! So let us know what you would like to see.

Here's already a quick preview of what we currently have in the pipeline:

• audio manipulation and metadata info
• video manipulation and metadata info
• online photo editor

So what's next?

I will do six blog posts with different use cases of AME, based on real-world examples, so you can see AME in action.

1. In our project for a flight school, we had to automatically create thumbnails and resize images.

2. An auction company wanted to allow people to upload pictures of the goods they want to sell, but every picture needs a watermark and stored on a specific location.

3. The Belgium Tennis Organization wants uniformity in images, so they store the original image and bring them to the same mime type, resolution and compression rate.

4. A photographer wanted to do analysis on his pictures; where it was taken (GPS location), if they used flash, which aperture it was set to etc. This meta data is stored with tags encoded using Exif, IPTC, and XMP.

5. Cavanti is allowing veterinarians to draw the issues a horse has directly on an image. So the final picture is overlain with different images.

6. A hotel in Belgium wanted to grayscale and rotate images

These posts will showcase the features of AME and the power it can bring to your projects. Try out APEX Media Extension (AME), we hope you enjoy it and feel free to let us know what you are searching for!