Upload documents (Joomla 5.3+)

As of Joomla 5.3, you can upload files to a special files folder instead of the images folder. It may seem like a small difference, but it's a big improvement in terms of usability and site structure.

Until now, Joomla by default had only the /images folder in the Media Manager for uploading. That meant: if you (or your users) wanted to upload PDF files or other documents, they went to the images folder, or a subfolder in the images folder (for example: /images/files).

Of course, you can create your own folder for uploads, but you need a bit of technical knowledge to do that. So for ordinary site administrators or content managers, that's not an option.

Usually people settle for creating a subfolder within /images, which is very simple. But then the path to the file would include /images somewhere (yourwebsite/images/files/yourfile), and that doesn't feel right to everyone. An image is an image and a code of conduct, terms of service or any other document is not. They are files and it just doesn't make sense to put them in a folder named "images," even if that folder has a subfolder.

New file folder in Joomla 5.3

In Joomla 5.3, a new folder has been added so you can choose the destination folder for your files: /images or /files. You do not need to configure anything for this, this works out of the box on new installations (for the techies: the plugin "FileSystem - Local" now has both folders configured by default).

In the Media Manager, you'll see the new folder.

Updating existing websites

You're probably wondering if this only applies to new 5.3 installations or if it can also be used on updated sites. Existing installations will also have the new folder, with no files in it yet. If you want to use it, take the following steps after updating to Joomla 5.3:

In the Media component, set the Path to Files Folder option to files;
Go to System -> Plugins and find the FileSystem - Local plugin. Add files to the list of folders (images is already there).

And that's it: now you can use the files folder to upload your files.