The inserter currently has tabs for Blocks, Patterns, and Reusable blocks. You can drag and drop content from these tabs into the canvas to build your pages. #44028 further redesigns this with a two-column split, and clearer categories.

This convenient way of adding content translates well to media as well. It'd be nice to starting exploring a "Media" tab for easy access to your library. The Media tab can explore integrating Openverse as well, plus an option to open the full media library.

The inserter panel should support the ability to drag media from the inserter into the canvas, including dragging into block placeholders to quickly update patterns and such with your own content. The Media tab would allow users to choose between categorized assets from the media library, and from Openverse.

The default state for the Media sidebar would show the last N items from the Media Library. We could also consider hiding the empty tabs, so initially, users will only see the Openverse one.

To avoid having two search boxes side by side, we should consider moving the inserter search box under the segment control, but we could still recommend both types of items (patterns and blocks) when users search for the other category as we do now.

Openverse

We should figure out which kind of media and licenses we'd like to show. I imagine that for the first iteration of this feature we could limit the results to just images that are in the Public Domain or CC0 licensed, but in the future we could explore showing more types of media and giving more fine-grained filtering options.

See the comments for some more explorations on openverse branding.

Figma file with the explorations.

See also: #41379.

Issue updated Sep 30.