Thanks – works great

I just wanted to give a shout out and say Thanks for this plugin and offer an example for people looking at this. (I was sort of clueless to begin with)

I installed on a WP 3.8.1 Network and created a subsite, which I called “sharedmediaMaster” where I’m loading media files to share with other sites – I don’t want them to have access to the primary site.

I created another one to test, which I called “sharedmediaClient”
and another called “pirate”

to make Network Shared Media Available I added “sharedmediaclient” as an Author user to “sharedmediamaster” (I tried contributor but it didn’t have enough permissions)-

while you can’t just add to the “sharedmediaclient” media library as you would add media from your computer, you can “add” media from the network through a post ‘add media’ – you’re not making a copy of the file, you’re just accessing it from the other subsite media library (BTW the new version of WP doesn’t show the Network Shared Media option as a tab, it is in the left side menu)

“pirate” can’t access the Network Shared Media

I’ve also installed JetPack Photon and WP Smush It, and Enable Media Replace – since Enable Media Replace doesn’t change the file name it worked when I replaced with a different image, the test post on “sharedmediaclient” changed to the new image – however it kept the original dimensions, so should keep that in mind (I could change the image dimensions editing the post itself)

With JetPack Photon enabled on the client site it served the image from the WP.com CDN, perfectly.

So now it is a matter of manually adding Author-Users to the subsite that serves the media – I have a plugin to bulk-add users which will work for sites with many existing users. I’m also thinking of encouraging people to write articles for that subsite since they are already authors (ha ha).

I haven’t tried it yet, but I think you can use Join My Multisite as one way to allow users to self-join via a frontend widget (not sure about default user level)

I know this is a long post, but hope someone finds it useful

Please continue to update the plugin as time goes on, it is much appreciated

https://wordpress.org/plugins/network-shared-media/