What's New in 1.4.0

WPMediaVerse 1.4.0 is a robustness release that hardens cloud storage, gives site owners precise control over AI spend, and finishes a full mobile and translation pass. This page also folds in the headline additions from 1.3.0 (the image optimization pipeline) so you have a single place to catch up.

Included in Free. Every item on this page applies to the free version unless marked Pro. Pro picks up these improvements automatically because Pro builds on top of free.

Storage that follows the media, not a toggle

Each media item is now served from where it is actually stored, combined with its privacy. Switching the active storage driver, or turning a cloud service on, no longer breaks media you uploaded earlier. Public media stored on cloud serves directly from the CDN. Local media serves through the plugin's own delivery route. There is nothing to toggle: the old "Serve public cloud media directly" checkbox has been retired because direct CDN serving for public media is now automatic. See Cloud Storage for the full behavior.

Private media stays on local disk (Pro)

Only public media is eligible for the cloud. Private and restricted uploads, including their thumbnails and generated variants, never leave your local disk. Each item is effectively "cloud or local" based on its own privacy, so a private photo is never copied to a CDN.

Tighter access checks on private media

The delivery route re-verifies the viewer's permission on every request for non-public media, so a shared link cannot be used to leak a private item. If a Cloudflare R2 bucket has no public domain configured, WPMediaVerse will not emit a raw bucket URL (those are never public) and falls back to serving locally.

Per-feature control over AI

AI is opt-in and off by default, and you now choose exactly which AI features run and what they cost:

• Generate Descriptions and Generate Tags are independent toggles under Auto-Analyze, so you can run one without the other.
• The AI Provider dropdown correctly switches between OpenAI, Google Vision, and AWS Rekognition (Pro). Earlier builds could silently fall back to OpenAI.
• The Monthly AI Budget now caps moderation calls too, not just analysis and tagging. A fresh install ships with a conservative $10 cap so AI never runs against an unbounded bill before you set a budget.

See AI & Moderation Settings for the full matrix.

Image optimization pipeline (added in 1.3.0)

Uploads are now optimized losslessly: file sizes shrink with no visible quality loss, and an original is never made larger (if there is no gain, the original is kept). Animated GIFs are detected and left untouched. WebP copies are generated by default and AVIF copies are available as an opt-in, and browsers that support those formats receive the smaller file automatically across the explore grid, BuddyPress activity, dashboard, single media, and the lightbox. The All Media admin screen gains an Optimization column with savings badges and per-row Optimize and Details actions. See Image Optimization.

Reliable moderation queue actions

The per-row Approve and Reject buttons in the Moderation Queue work correctly again. They were previously dead because of nested forms in the markup.

100% mobile ready

Every customer-facing surface was verified at a 390px viewport. Explore tag chips, the upload privacy selector, and the lightbox close and gallery navigation controls were all raised to the 44px touch target floor, and the layouts produce zero horizontal overflow on a phone.

100% translation ready

Every user-facing string across the chat and messaging templates is wrapped for translation, the BuddyPress activity media script is bridged for JavaScript translations, and the translation template files were regenerated. The plugin is ready for full localization out of the box.