📖 Adding Images and Multimedia to WordPress

Media Library

The media library in WordPress is a tool used to organize images and multimedia content to ease the process of adding those elements to pages and posts. WP Beginner has a few tutorials on adding images and multimedia.

Here are some things to remember when working with images and media in WP.

  • Repository for images and other files used on your WordPress site
  • Images added to a post or page are automatically added to the media library
  • Images can also be uploaded directly into the media library. This is helpful for bulk uploads
  • All images should have alternate text for accessibility
  • Images may have titles and captions
  • Images may be linked to larger image, posts or pages
  • Under Settings in the dashboard, select media to select default sizes for your images. You can also select to store media in folders based on month and year or keep all files in one big folder.
  • WordPress does not provide a good way to tag and search for images
  • You may want to consider using an outside service such as Flickr if you have a lot of images or YouTube for videos. Click Add Media and then Insert from URL to show an image from the web.

Images

  • Embedded images can be placed in a post or page where you want it to appear. 
  • Featured images are placed by the theme and have special functionality 
  • Images may also be added from the Internet
  • Multiple images may be uploaded to the media library and displayed as a gallery to conserve space

Obtaining images for your site

  • Use a photo from a digital camera
  • Scan in a physical image
  • Draw or create an image using graphics software
  • Buy ready-made images
  • Download an image from the web - making sure that it is not copyright protected!
  • One good source of free images is http://www.freeimages.com

You can also use Google

  1. Go to google.com/images.
  2. Click on the setting options directly below the search box near the center of the top of screen and select Advanced Search.
  3. Scroll down to the Usage rights drop-down list and select 'Free to use or share' and then click the Advanced Search button.
  4. These images should be ok to use on your site.

https://www.rivaliq.com/blog/guide-copyright-fair-use-laws-online-images/

Audio/Video 

  • Audio and video files may be embedded in a page or post
  • It is best to host videos on a site such as YouTube or Vimeo instead of uploading to the media library
  • Bandwidth - videos are large and can eat up your bandwidth very quickly
  • Encoding / compatibility - let someone else go to the trouble of converting files to a web-friendly format.