Uploading and Inserting Media
“Media”, in terms of this training post, is any file not displayed as a webpage. Media can be a picture file, PDF file, audio file, or any other kind of file. There are many ways that you can upload, insert, and display media. The easiest way to manage all of the media for your site is to go to the “Media” menu on the left hand side of your dashboard, seen below.
Media Library
When you click “library”, a menu opens up where you can see a list of all of the media files (images, files, audio, etc.) which you have uploaded to the site through this library.
You can sort the files to make managing them easier. Right under the “media library” title, you can see clickable items to sort your media. You can choose all (default), just images, just audio, or unattached, meaning media that has yet to be linked or otherwise attached to a page or post.
Underneath these options, you will see two drop down menus. The first is for bulk actions. These are actions that you can apply to one or many media items by checking the box to the left of each and selecting an action, then clicking “apply.” Next to this option is another filtering option, where you can choose to show all dates or choose which individual month you would like to display. These dates represent the date/month when the file was added to the media library. Click filter after you have selected your choice. Above this area and to the right, you can also search the media files by file name.
This menu shows the file name, who uploaded the photo (the “author”, or who was logged in and performed the upload), what the file is attached to (which posts or pages), if the file has a comment, and on what date the file was added.
Adding New Media
You can add new media to the library using the “Add New” link in the left menu. Or, if you are in the Media Library page, you can click “Add New” at the top left. When you click “Add New” , you will see the following menu. Click the “Select Files” button, and a window will appear, asking you to pull files from your computer. Choose the media files that you would like to upload, and wait for them to load.
Once the files have loaded, you will see the following menu, allowing you to change certain aspects of the file, such as the title, alt text (text shown in case it has been blocked from display for some reason; also used for search engines), caption, and description. You can also choose not to alter any of this information. Click “Save All Changes” when you are done. You will be directed back to the Media Library.
Inserting Media Into A Page or Post
If you are creating a page or a post, you will see some icons above the text area. The icons highlighted in the screen shot below are the media icons, which you will need to click to add images or other media files to the page or post.
When you click one of the icons, an upload window appears. To upload an image, click the first icon, and you will receive a menu very similar to the “Add New” menu that you just read about. You will also see some different tabs at the top of this screen.
- “From Computer” allows you to choose files on your local hard drive to upload to your site for use. It will be copied in to your Media Library.
- “From URL” asks you to insert the URL of a photo from another site. “Gallery” is a collection of previously added images from that same post or page.
- “Media Library” shows all of the images that have been uploaded to your site in general.
- “NextGen Gallery” allows you to insert a Gallery (for more information see our previous blog post on the NextGen Gallery).
Once your file has uploaded or chosen, it will show you more options that look like the following menu. This is where you adjust all of the settings of the file and decide how it should be aligned, if it should link somewhere or to something, what its title should be, alt text you may want, if it should have a caption, and what size (in pixels) you would like it to display. (NOTE: the site’s content area is 580 pixels wide, so take that in to consideration if you modify the width of an image.) This may take some getting used to if you are not familiar with using images on the web. Practice is recommended.
