Lingo offers several solutions for sharing your content in a controlled way, with public and password protected portals and kits, download requests, and space membership.

But sometimes you want to simply share a link to download content directly without any hurdles, or display your content on an website or in an email. For those occasions, there is Direct Links.

When you use direct links, the selected content is mirrored to a global content delivery network (CDN), providing blazing-fast download speeds to your users, anywhere in the world. This backing means that whether you're sending a large file to a single user, or embedding images on your company website for hundreds of thousands of users to view, direct links are up to the task.

When viewing an asset in the Asset Library or inside a Kit, you'll see a Direct Links section in the sidebar asset inspector.

Click on Create Link, and a new direct link will be created for that asset. Click on the name of the direct link, in this case "Default", and the link will be copied to your clipboard.

You can use this link anywhere on the internet, or send it via email or text message. A typical direct link will look like this:

The filename portion of the URL will always match the name of the asset when the link is created.

Whenever you replace the file on an asset that has direct links, the content of all the direct links will be updated to the new file, without changing the URL. It may take a few minutes for the global content delivery network to reflect the changes around the world.

⚠️ Note: When direct links exist for an asset, you cannot replace the file on an asset with a different type of file. For example, a JPG asset with active direct links cannot be replaced with a TIFF or PNG file, it can only be replaced by another JPG file.

A direct link can be deleted at any time. This will remove the content from the CDN and break the direct link permanently. Select the 3 dots menu and click on "Delete link" to delete the direct link.

Deleting an asset will also permanently delete all direct links for that asset. It may take a few minutes for the global content delivery network to reflect the changes around the world.

Assets can have multiple direct links, and direct links can be named so that you can easily track how your direct links are being distributed.

The first link you create is called "Default", but you can add a name to it at any time by selecting the 3 dots menu and clicking on "Edit link".

When you add subsequent links after the first one, you will be asked to give the link a unique name before it can be created. Here is an example image showing an asset that has 4 direct links.

On your Insights screen, there is a tab labeled "Direct Links". In this tab, you'll can view overall traffic statistics for your direct links, as well as drill down into specific direct links to view referrer and geographic information, to see where your content is being accessed from; you can also view which IP addresses are downloading your content, so you can analyze unexpected activity on your links.

For example, here is a screenshot of the geography detail for a single direct link.

Direct links are supported for nearly all asset types in Lingo, except for the following types:

For certain types of image assets, a direct link can be modified to adjust the size and format of the image on the fly, so you can use one direct link to display the image at different sizes across the web.

Using our example link from earlier, that image is 1200 x 700. If we want it to be smaller, we can add some parameters to the end of the url, like this:

When that URL is accessed, the image is returned at 800 x 467 and weighs 7 KB.

You can also change the format of an image, in case you want to ensure that your content is efficiently compressed for quick downloads when used on your website. While you can manually assign a format, there is also an automatic option that will return WebP or AVIF depending on the client. This automatic option can be used like this:

Inside Lingo, this file weighs 53 KB. Using this automatic option results in an image that is just 1 KB when accessed via Chrome, or 12 KB when accessed in other browsers. In addition to "auto", you can ask for "webp" or "avif" specifically.

You can combine these two options like this:

This URL will provide back an 800 x 467 image that weighs 3 KB thanks to WebP compression.

These advanced features are supported for the following image asset types: