Adding Images
Adding Images Directly to the Media Library
You can upload media and document files to your Media Library without creating a post or page first. This allows you to upload files to use with posts and pages later and/or to get a web link for a particular file that you can share. There are three options for uploading files:
- From your Dashboard, navigate to Media > Add New
- Drag and drop your files into dashed area. Multiple files are allowed.
- Clicking Select Files opens a navigation window showing you files in your computer. Selecting Open after clicking on the file you want activates a progress bar on the uploader screen.
- Revert to the Browser Uploader by clicking the link below the drag and drop box.
You can often add images directly as you are writing page or post content in the WordPress Editor, or when using Page Builder Modules. Either way typically launches a file uploader that allows you to surf your computer for an image file or will allow you to simply drag and drop a file into the browser window. Using these methods allows you to place your images in the flow of your content or module exactly as you would like, either aligned left, right or center, or as a background, parallax or other module image.
Image File Types
WordPress supports uploading images that use jpg, jpeg, gif and png extensions.
Categories, Captions and Alternative Text
When adding images, or other media, its a good idea to assign media categories to your files. As your Media Library grows over time, this will make sorting and finding files later much easier because you will be able to filter and view files by single categories.
Captions for images are not always necessary, but adding captions to your images helps visitors understand the content of your images. Captions are often displayed in a shaded box around your image, so be conscious of this visual difference if you choose to use captions on your site images.
Alternative Text is important to aid visitors who are visually impaired. This text does not display on your page, but is instead readable by text reader applications. Search Engines also read Alt Text when indexing your website, so adding them has an added SEO benefit for you.
Editing Images
The Edit Media screen allows you to edit the data fields for a file within the Media Library.
Below is a brief summary of the available editing actions.
Read this article for more detailed information about Editing Images.
For images only, you can click on Edit Image under the thumbnail to open an inline image editor with icons for cropping, rotating, or flipping the image as well as for undoing and redoing your edits. The boxes on the right give you more options for scaling the image, for cropping it, and for cropping the thumbnail in a different way than you crop the original image. You can click on the Help Icons (?) in those boxes to get more information.
Image Cropping
To crop an image, click on it and drag the cropping frame to select the desired part. Use the handles to fine tune your selection. Click the Crop tool to perform the cropping action, then click the Save button.
Crop Aspect Ratio
The aspect ratio is the relationship between the width and height. You can preserve the aspect ratio by holding down the shift key while resizing your selection. Use the input box to specify the aspect ratio, e.g. 1:1 (square), 4:3, 16:9, etc.
Crop Selection
Once you have made your selection, you can adjust it by entering the size in pixels. The minimum selection size is the thumbnail size as set in the Media settings.
You can replace an existing file with a new one by clicking Replace Media. Simply upload a new file (of the same file type) to replace the old one, or replace the file and update file name and all links to it.
Remember to click Update to save what you have entered or changed.