Media Library

Images have to go somewhere

There will be times that you want to add an image, or several images in the case of a Gallery module. Whether you add the image from inside a text module dialogue or you’re adding/removing images from a photo or gallery module you’ll need to add the image to the Media Library. The Media Library is an image database that stores the images for us to present on the website.

Image size and Image Compression

A note about images. Images can be a website killer so it is important that the images you use are small in size. If you are uploading an image that is larger than 800 KB it is too large. Most images that will be on our website should not be any larger than 150-225 KB. Getting images to the right size can be tricky especially if you don’t have graphic design software like Adobe Photoshop.

If you have images that are quite large (anything over the 800KB maximum) you can change the size of the image by going to https://tinyjpg.com and dropping your image into its drop area. You can load up to 20 images here as long as they are smaller than 5 MB each.

Drag your image or images into the drop area, and TinyJPG will do the rest for you. Once it or they have been compressed, you can download them individually from the downlink on the right of each image row, or download the whole kit and kaboodle from the “Download All” button.

Uploading to the Media Library

Although it’s possible to load the images while you are working on a page, I find that it’s best to load the images that we are going to use before we use them. To do this, we will go to the Media Library in our WordPress Dashboard. If you are in the middle of working on a page that you need to change some images on, you’ll first want to save a draft or publish what you’ve done so far. Then click on the site title in the upper left of the black bar at the top of the window. This will take us back to the Dashboard, where we will click on Media. If you want to eliminate a click, you can hover over the Media link, and you’ll be given the option to “Add New”, click here, and you’ll skip to the Media Upload page. Once you’ve arrived on the media library page, click the “Add New” button. From here you can navigate to the folder where you have your web-optimized images or drag the files you want to add onto the drop area of the Media Library page to upload as many images as you need.

Naming Images

Naming images in a consistent manner really helps when trying to track them down in the future. The naming convention that I try to adhere to is something like this; Topic-Gallery-Number, or Topic-Header-Number. So a graduation photo that I’d use in the body of a webpage might be titled something like Graduation-Gallery-1. If it pertains to header images, obviously, I’d label it something like Graduation-Header-1, and the next one I’d upload would be Graduation-Header-2. Another acceptable example would be Topic-Gallery-Date. This option alleviates the need to remember how many images we’ve uploaded with that topic unless you’ve uploaded 6 images of the same topic. In this case, I’d encourage you to name it something like Topic-Gallery-Date-Number or Graduation-Gallery-092422-3.

It is appreciated that you use a numbered date and no spaces in the image names, so a file that might be on your computer as “Bison Stampede CPW Sept 2023” should look something like “Bison-Stampede-CPW-091023-1” on the website.