The WordPress Media Library Explained

In this post, we will explore the WordPress Media Library to help you understand where your images and other media files are stored once they are added to your website. We will also look at how you can perform basic editing on your images, including changing their size with the scaling or cropping tools and rotating and flipping them. This may be especially helpful once you have gone through the WordPress Pages and Posts post.

Finally, we will cover how to add image galleries to your posts and pages. This feature of WordPress makes it easy to insert a selection of images into a post and then configure how they are organized.

Every WordPress website has a media library. Each time you add an image to a post, page, or elsewhere on your website, it is automatically added to the media library. This library of media files, such as images, videos, and audio, can be found under the Media item in the sidebar menu of your WordPress website’s Admin Dashboard.

Once you’ve opened the media library, you can change the view to either a list or grid layout. You can also filter the items by type or date and search the library for specific files.

Clicking an item in the media library lets you inspect the file and learn more about it. The attachment details screen displays information about the file, including its name, type, upload date, and file size and dimensions.

You can also see which post the image was uploaded to and where it is being used on your website. The URL field on the attachment details screen displays the direct link to the file. This can be useful if you want to manually link to the media file from one of your posts or pages, or even externally from your website. Examples of this could be in an email or a social media post.

By default, every image and other media file uploaded to your website has an attachment page. This is a management page that includes the file and some other basic information about it. All changes made to the attachment details will be automatically saved in WordPress. Below is a list of the default settings on the attachment page:

Images or other media files you insert into your posts and pages are automatically added to the media library, and you can also add them directly to the library yourself. You might want to do this if you’d like to make several files available to your co-authors for use in their posts or if you need to link to the files from elsewhere on your site or link to them externally without publishing them in a post.

Adding the images directly to the media library is very straightforward. You can drag and drop them into place by clicking on the “Add New” item under the Media sidebar menu. Alternatively, you can click the Select Files button to locate the files on your computer the old-fashioned way. You can select multiple files simultaneously to save time with whichever option you choose.

Once the files are in the library, they can be edited and inserted into your posts and pages by clicking the Add Media button on the post editor screen.

When viewing the attachment details page for an image, you will notice, at the bottom, a “Edit More Details” link. Clicking this button takes you to an “Edit” option. If you click “Edit,” you will be presented with options that allow you to make basic changes to the image. The editing features include cropping, scaling, image rotation, and image flipping.

However, you can also scale an image proportionally to reduce its dimensions while maintaining its aspect ratio. Furthermore, you can also crop an image by dragging the cursor over it to make a selection. This allows you to select the area to keep, with the rest of the image discarded.

After you’ve made any changes, remember to save the image before returning it to the media library. Now, you can insert the new version of the file into your posts and pages. Any previous instances of the image on your website will remain as they were.

Whenever you upload a new image to your website, WordPress creates three more versions of that file: thumbnail, media, and large. Each of these three versions has different dimensions or physical size. You can change these three default sizes through the Media Settings screen if necessary.

In the media library settings, you can also configure how files are organized on your server as you upload them. Managing one or multiple Avada websites will mean that you will be managing hundreds, if not thousands, of media files such as images, videos, audios, documents, etc., and this is why WordPress media organization is vital. This is where FileBird comes in.

As each image you add to your WordPress website is automatically added to the media library, the size of the library can quickly grow. While you won’t want to delete any images used in your posts, you may want to delete the ones in the library that haven’t been used on your site.

WordPress makes it easy to filter the images or other media files that haven’t been inserted into (attached to) a page or post. You can view all the unattached files by selecting “Unattached” from the filter drop-down list.

These are the files that were either uploaded directly to the media library rather than inserted into a post first, or added to a post but later deleted. If you are sure you no longer need these files, you can delete them in one fell swoop by clicking the “Delete Selected” button.

Hopefully, you now understand how WordPress stores and manages the images and other media files you’ve added to your website. WordPress image galleries can also be a handy way to work with images more effectively on your website.

Using image thumbnails, which automatically link to larger versions of your photographs and other images, can help your pages load faster and let your visitors see more of your media content on a single page.