Once upon a time, if you wanted to add a picture to a blog post, you had to upload the image file via FTP and then write a whole bunch of HTML and CSS to make it appear in your post just the way you wanted it to. But no more. WordPress lets you easily embed pictures in posts, and change how they appear: if you want clickable thumbnails or to make the text flow nicely around the image, all that can be done at the click of a button.

To add a picture, just click the "photograph" icon above the post box. This will bring up a window which allows you to select the image you want and upload it automatically to WP.

(If you get an HTTP Error doing this, you can either switch to the "browser uploader", or install this plugin, either of which should cure the problem.)

Once your image file has uploaded, you'll get a window with a short form in it: this lets you specify the title of the image and the caption: the latter is what will be used for the alt-text and, if your theme has them, the caption beside the picture. The bottom three options, link URL, alignment and size, control how your picture appears in your post.

• If you're going to show a thumbnail of the picture, you'll want to link that to the full-size image, so click the "file URL" button.
• If you're going to have the full-size picture in your post, you probably don't want to make that clickable (why bother?) so click the "none" button to get rid of the link.
• Alignment controls how the text will flow around your picture. Choosing either "left" or "right" is probably what you want: the little icons show you how the text will go.
• Finally, size lets you choose the (surprise) size of the picture as you want it to show up in your post. Combining a smaller size with a "file URL" link on the picture makes your image into a clickable thumbnail.
• When you've picked the options you want, click "insert into post", and the code to display your image will automatically be added to your "edit post" box.

Adding multiple pictures

If you want to add more than one picture to a post, you can select more than one file with the uploader. Clicking "insert into post" will close the "add an image" window, so if you want to add additional pictures, click on the photograph icon again, select the "gallery" tab, and all the image files you've uploaded for this post will be listed, so just pick the one you want and go through the "insert into post" routine.

Sometimes if you're adding several pictures to a single post, you'll want to have them nicely formatted and placed in line. WordPress has a neat way to do this: click the photograph icon again, scroll to the bottom of the window, and you can automatically insert a gallery of all the images you've added to the post. There are options to control the number of columns, the size of the pictures you want in the actual posts, and whether those pictures link directly to the full-size image, or to an "attachment page" (go for the former, it's much less annoying).

Tags: gallery, images, photo, photograph, pictures, upload, WordPress

Posted by Sue on December 7, 2008 in Themes.