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Over Easter I tried to help a blogger from the States with placing images into her posts.
At first it was simply telling her she couldn’t cut and paste images from another source and place them amongst her text. All images that go into your posts need to become part of your blog first. They need to be given their own identity within the blog, properly saved to get their own URL, and a position within the blog’s space in the internet, which is called the server.
Even my logo has its special place within my blog. I am able to bring it up each time because I have stored it in the media gallery, which you can access by clicking on the image icon above the writing post area. This is the first way of bringing an image correctly into your blog, to place in your post and amongst your other images to use again.
As this poor blogger couldn’t do this (there seemed to be something preventing her from uploading images into her blog’s server), all I could do was to recommend asking help from the WordPress.org forums. I hope one of the technicians provided the answer, such as turning off the plugins first or typing in a special code into the Settings area.
FileZilla
Puzzling over this, I realised there is another way to put images into the server and then into the posts, by-passing the media icon and gallery. This is only possible if you have access to the FTP of your blog, and I use an application called FileZilla for this purpose.
FileZilla reveals the contents within the blog’s server. There are quite a lot of files that go towards making a blog happen properly. If you know your way around, within ‘public_html’ you will find a file called ‘images’ where you can upload your pictures. This will give each picture its own very simple URL, such as yourblog’sURL/imagename.jpg, without any extra files or dates clogging it up.
You can upload your pictures by simply dragging them into that file (once you’ve opened it up in FileZilla) or via the uploading mechanism recommended by your FTP provider. Be careful about naming your images, so you can access them later when there are a lot of other pictures stored there, even though they are placed in time-sequence.
The only problem is that you won’t be able to see them in your media gallery, so make sure they are the exact size you need, and you have a record of the image names (and make sure these are absolutely correct) to save you having to search them out in FileZilla later.
And now you go to your post-content page, place your cursor where you want your picture to go, click on the media icon, and now select ‘From URL’ instead of ‘From Computer’:
Make sure the Image radio button is checked.
The URL field is where you type in yourblog’sURL/imagename.jpg, which is why it needs to be exactly correct, or it won’t match with what’s uploaded into your server. WordPress will let you know if it is correct with a green tick or not with a red cross.
The ‘title’ field is marked as required (shown by the red asterisk) to show a yellow tag when moused over. Ideally the ‘alternate text’ field should also be required (you can use the same description) so that the search engines can read your images, as well as partially sighted visitors.
The rest of the menu is pretty standard, except for the ‘link image to’ field. This is where you can link your picture to another webpage or an email address (by adding mailto: immediately before the email address) like my logo. This is particularly useful if you have created a button image as a call to action.
Once you have confirmed by clicking ‘Insert into Post’, your picture should appear as you desire. Happy blogging!
