Introducing Three New Features to Tell Beautiful Stories on Medium

Now you can create image grids from our iOS app, write inline code, and drag and drop images on web

Sometimes, you want more than words to tell your tale. We want to give you a seamless canvas to focus on the important stuff (your story) and convey your thoughts as clearly as possible. We’re excited to announce powerful new tools aimed at making storytelling easier and even more beautiful than before.

Mobile image grids on iOS and Android

When improving storytelling tools, our guiding principle is to preserve your intent and to maintain a story’s look and feel whenever possible, no matter on which platform the story is viewed.

Image grids (like the one below) can now be viewed on your iOS and Android apps as well as on mobile web: They will appear as thumbnails on mobile devices and can be tapped and swiped through to see full-sized versions.

On our mobile apps, you can now easily zoom and swipe on image grids. If you’re on mobile now, try it on this image grid above. (Photos courtesy of our friends at Monumental.)

You can also create image grids on iOS. Select multiple images from any album on your phone (or multiple albums at once) in the order you want them displayed to create your grid.

On our iOS app, you can create image grids by selecting the photos in order.

Inline code and easier access to code blocks

Inline code formatting was consistently top on our “most requested feature” list, particularly for engineers, developers, and technical writers. Previously, you could only include code blocks as a separate block of text; now, you will be able to include blocks of code directly within your sentences by putting text between a backtick that looks like this: `. We’ve also made the shortcut for standalone code blocks more intuitive, using three backticks at the beginning of a line.

Want to copy code directly from a technical document (like Github)? We got you covered — pasted code will render automatically as a code block. You also can highlight text in the editor and hit the backtick key to convert it to inline code.

Code blocks can be written only via web but will render across all platforms.

Drag and drop images on web

Creation entails editing, and editing often entails moving around large swaths of your story, including the images within them. Once an image has been placed in the Medium editor, you can now move it around your story by clicking on the image with your cursor and dragging it to a new location. All formatting and layout options will be preserved when you do this (including with image grids!).

On the web, you can drag and drop images around your draft to move them to a new location or make an image grid.

You can also use drag and drop to create an image grid: Grab the photo and drag it on top of another image — repeat as many times as you want until you create the visual effect you want. Medium will do the heavy lifting and resize the images to look great together.

In addition to these changes, we’ve added new services you can embed content from in your Medium stories. In the last month, we’ve added support for embeds for product cards from Product Hunt, travel maps from Alpaca, and newsletter signup forms from Upscribe.

All our improvements are geared towards making our editor simpler, easier, and more powerful for creators across web and mobile platforms. We’re excited to hear your thoughts on the updates and look forward to hearing what you’d like to see from us next. Feel free to sound off in a response — we’re all ears.