The Media Gallery
The shared pin-board for images, video, and audio — used across characters, locations, props, and shots.
The Media Gallery is a shared component that appears on character, location, prop, scene, and shot pages. It's the place where all generated and uploaded media lives, and where you curate what gets used in production.
Think of it as a pin-board: you accumulate media, mark the best items as approved, and archive the rest.
Starring — marking quality media
Starring (☆) marks an item as approved quality — a "gold star" meaning "you can use this one confidently." Multiple items can be starred.
Starred items float to the top of the gallery in Grid, List, and Graph views, so your best candidates are always easy to find. When you want to use a starred item as an input to a recipe step, drag it from the gallery into the input field — the star makes it easy to spot among many options.
Starring does not automatically wire an item into a workflow. It is a curation signal, not a selection. Different workflow steps might want different starred items from the same gallery.
Unlinking removes an item from the gallery without deleting it from cloud storage. It's a soft-remove; the file remains in storage.
View modes
The gallery has three view layouts:
| Mode | Use for |
|---|---|
| Grid | Browsing thumbnails quickly |
| List | Comparing metadata, dates, and tags |
| Graph | Viewing the ancestry of media assets |
Graph view
The Graph view shows the ancestry of each media asset — which recipe, workflow step, and input files produced it, tracing back through previous steps in the chain. This is powered by the provenance data that OA stores when it routes a completed ComfyUI job to the gallery (see ComfyUI Integration). Use it to understand how a result was achieved, or to trace which source assets contributed to a final output.
Supported media types
| Type | Formats |
|---|---|
| Images | PNG, JPG, WebP, GIF, SVG, BMP, TIFF |
| Video | MP4, WebM, MOV, AVI, and others |
| Audio | MP3, WAV, AAC, FLAC, M4A, and others |
| 3D Models | GLB |
| Text / References | TXT, MD, external links |
Generating media
From the gallery, you can trigger AI generation by selecting a Recipe from the Workflow tab. The recipe runs one or more ComfyUI steps and deposits the results back into the gallery. See Recipes & the Cookbook and ComfyUI Integration for how this works.
Load as Recipe
Selecting Load as Recipe on any gallery item reconstructs a recipe from that item's ancestry — the same workflow steps, input configuration, and connections that produced this result. You can then:
- Save it to the Cookbook as a new recipe for future reuse
- Upvote an existing recipe if an identical one is already in the Cookbook
This is the natural way to build the Cookbook: generate something good interactively, then capture how you did it so it can be repeated.
Image editing
The gallery includes a built-in image editor with:
- Rectangular, spherical, and cylindrical crop
- Perspective and 3D pose tools (OpenPose SVG)
- Colour adjustment and layering
- Sketch mode
Tags
Items can be tagged for filtering and workflow targeting. Tags support suggestions and can carry purpose hints (first, last) used when ordering items within a generation sequence.
Selecting a step output
When a recipe has multiple steps, the output of one step can be the input to a later step. Clicking on a completed output in the gallery selects it — a checkmark appears — and all later recipe steps that are linked to that output automatically refresh their inputs to reflect your selection.
This lets you experiment: run step 1 multiple times to get several candidates, click the one you want, and steps 2, 3, and any other linked later steps update instantly to use that output as their starting point.
You can manually override a later step's input by dragging a different item into its input slot. That step no longer follows the selection from the earlier output. To restore the link, click the earlier output again and the override is reset.
Shot-to-shot chaining
The same selection mechanism works across shots. The output of a step in one shot can feed as an input to a step in a later shot — not just the immediately following shot, but any later shot that references it.
How it works:
- Run a recipe step in one shot and click its output to select it
- In a later shot's recipe, the input field for a linked step is pre-filled with that selected output
- The graph view shows these cross-shot connections explicitly
Starred items from the earlier shot's gallery make it easy to find your best candidates — but you drag the one you want into the input field rather than having it wired automatically.
Upstream suggestions
When you open the recipe panel, input fields may be pre-filled with suggestions based on what was previously selected in earlier steps within this gallery session. These suggestions are persisted so they survive page reloads. You can always override a suggestion by dragging a different item in, and reset it by clicking the original output again.
Provenance
Every gallery item generated through a ComfyUI workflow carries provenance: the recipe that produced it, the step within that recipe, the input files used, and the workflow JSON. This is what powers the Graph view and the Load as Recipe feature. Provenance is stored when OA detects a completed job and routes its output to the gallery.
Where it appears
The same Media Gallery component is used on:
- Characters — character visual references and generated images
- Locations — location reference imagery and generated backgrounds
- Props — prop visual references
- Scenes — scene-level media
- Shots — shot-level generated media (the primary output of the Take phase)