A “Fine Art” you ask? Well, not necessarily. It is actually fairly straightforward. WordPress 2.1 provides a much-improved interface for uploading files — you may have already noticed it beneath the main post window. Take a look at it now: a tab titled “Upload” with “File”, “Title” and “Description” fields below. There’s also a button labeled “Browse” and a further tab labeled “Browse All” (…and don’t worry if this doesn’t make sense yet; all of this browsing will become clear in the very near future).
Preparation
We need to prepare our files for upload. WordPress is set up to deal with .jpgs and .gifs as well as any other filetype you might want people to download rather than display within their browsers. Uploading a bunch of photos straight from your camera is not a good idea. Even 3 megapixel cameras produce images of 1.5MB and this is really too big, especially when you consider that images with large dimensions will “break” your page layout. So, use your favorite photo-editing software and resize the pictures you want to upload, trying for a width of 500 pixels maximum at 72dpi (or screen resolution) and save them as .jpg.
Tip: When you are saving your compressed and resized images, try to ensure you use numbers, dashes, underscores and letters only. In particular, don’t include spaces or overlong names, and ensure you use the three letter suffix, like .jpg or .doc — these tell the application what to do with the file.
Browsing, Tagging and Uploading
Click on the browse button and you’ll find yourself viewing your own computer’s hard drive. Find the file you want to upload and select it. Next give the file a title: make it descriptive while keeping in mind those friendly neighborhood search engines — they’ll pick up on this text as well as your blog entries. With the description you can go to town on the keywords. When you are happy, click “Upload”.
The page will refresh, and when it does you’ll find a new tab has inserted and highlighted itself between the “Upload” and “Browse All” tabs. Called simply “Browse” (to add to our flourishing collection of “browses”) this area gives you several options:
- Show
Literally, what is it you want to show in your post, be it the full-size picture, a thumbnail of the same or the title only. The latter might be very useful if you have a great number of pictures to link to on a particular page — and is the only option when you have uploaded a file which is not an image (e.g. a Word document or a PDF). - Link
Again you have three choices here:- “File” will link you to the .jpg itself, so that when the link is clicked the full-size picture appears
- “Page” is a post with the picture/file, its title and description, as well as the opportunity for visitors to the site to comment upon it.
- “None”
When you have selected the options you are happy with click on “Send to the Editor”. This will send the link to the post itself.
Formatting
The picture or file will have been inserted wherever the cursor was left, and will act like another piece of text which is fine for a simple link. To ensure text flows around the picture properly, select it (when it’s selected, small squares appear at the corners and midway along each side of the picutre) and then use the text tools in the “Visual” bar above the “Post” box to shift it left or right or to center it.
Editing
The title and description of a picture or file can be edited at any time. In the case of our newly uploaded picture, simply click on “Edit” to the right of the picture’s title and another nifty piece of AJAX javascript later, we have the familiar information ready for further honing. The changes you make here will not only affect the picture/file as it is displayed in the post you have just entered it into, but also the picture/files’s own page.
And Finally … Browse All
After a while you’ll build up a whole library of files, and will often re-use files across several posts. You can access previously uploaded pictures and files in this tab — the interface is exactly the same as the one used for newly uploaded files.
Next, Becoming Part of the Management.
Nice tutorial. And much needed. I still like the Image Manager plugin for images, though.