FAQ | Frame.io API Documentation

The Frame.io API allows developers to integrate Frame.io’s surface for creatives and their teams to manage their work.

General Questions

Where is the API reference?

Go here to see the Frame.io API reference pages.

How can I get help?

Reach out to the Frame.io support team for assistance by chatting with us on our Support Site. Please note that enterprise customers may be directed to their Customer Success Manager.

What are the key concepts to the Frame.io API?

Frame.io serves not only post-production video professionals but also creatives and creative managers across disciplines. It acts as a central canvas for multidisciplinary teams, supporting needs from more focus time for creative work to increased visibility into ongoing projects.

Workflow Management

Centralize, organize, and build all your end-to-end creative workflows at scale leveraging Metadata, Custom Fields, and Collections.

File Transfer and Management

This set of capabilities gives users all the flexibility and power to build the best file management system for their creative process making it easier to quickly get the information they need, and manage all their work-in-progress assets at scale.

Review and Approval

Frame.io helps creative teams reduce the total number of revision cycles with advanced review, commenting, and annotation capabilities available across a broad set of media types.

Sharing and Presentation

Customize and share creative work from one central place.

Security and Governance

View and manage all users, workspaces, and projects in one place. Take bulk actions and export information to control how you utilize usage data.

Open API Standards

A REST API documented via the OpenAPI 3.0 specification can connect Frame.io to the systems you already use to unlock custom workflows.

Compatibility Questions

Is the Frame.io API backward compatible?

No. The Frame.io product operates in fundamentally different ways and emphasizes different workflows than the legacy product. Due to these differences, the API is not backward compatible.

How will backwards compatibility be handled going forwards?

Recognizing that backward compatibility is a major concern for customers managing production-quality integrations with high uptime requirements, we are designing the API to support an additional level of versioning via a custom HTTP header. This will allow clients to opt into experimental endpoints, avoid breaking changes, and provide backward compatibility guarantees within the /v4 API namespace.

Availability Questions

Can we create and manage Collections programmatically with the Frame.io API?

We do not yet have any Collections endpoints publicly available. But, Collections management is under development.

Media & Files

How long are media link URLs valid?

URLs returned in media_links includes (such as download_url, inline_url, and url) are temporary signed URLs — they expire and cannot be reused indefinitely.

URL type	Expiry
Download and inline URLs (`original`, `high_quality`, `efficient`, `video_h264_180`)	Up to 24 hours
Thumbnail and preview URLs (`thumbnail`)	Up to 24 hours

In practice, expiry is aligned to UTC noon or midnight, so the actual time remaining when you receive a URL may be anywhere between a few minutes and 24 hours depending on when the request is made.

Do not store or cache these URLs. Always request a fresh set of media_links each time you need to serve or access a file. Attempting to use an expired URL will result in a 403 error from the CDN.