This is Part 1 of my Beyond the Words series exploring the various and sundry ways in which you can add multimedia such as images, videos, audios, and downloadables (PDFs) to your website to spice it up.
I’m always on the hunt for a good way to store and access all of my family photos – looking to keep them well organized and easy to view when I want to come back and browse through them again or when I’m trying to find something specific.
Just to be super clear, the WordPress Media Library is not that solution. The Media Library is more like the spice cabinet in your kitchen – it’s where all the stuff that makes your cooking interesting lives, but it’s not tremendously organized and can be kind of tough to find your way around.
(That’s really a picture of my spice cabinet.)
Really, it’s somewhat of a pain in the neck until you wrap your head around it, but once you get the hang of it and know some of the awesome things it can do for you, you’ll end up visiting more and more often when you’re working on your website.
First of all, what even is the Media Library?
I would venture to guess that most people rarely, if ever, access the Media Library directly. Typically, folks will interact with a slightly modified view of the Media Library when they’re adding images to their blog posts and pages using the ADD MEDIA button.
But if you head on over to the left hand sidebar in your WordPress dashboard and actually click on MEDIA, you’ll come up with a lovely array of all of the images, audios, PDFs, whatevers that you’ve uploaded to your website using that ADD MEDIA button. And you can do some wondrous things here.
There are 2 views of the media library
The Grid View lets you look at lots of images at once. Especially if you’ve been going at it for a while and have lots of media on your site, the grid view will help you browse through all of that quickly and the larger thumbnails let you see more of what you’ve got. It shows lots more images per page. There are other (probably better) ways of searching through your library, and we’ll get to those, but for now, know that the grid view is your Pinterest-like friend for quickly perusing.
The List view will tell you interesting little tidbits about a particular image like what blog post or page it was used on.
Both of these views are a little bit confusing in that there doesn’t seem to be much rhyme or reason to how they’re sorted. By default, you’ll see them in a reverse chronological order of when they were uploaded to your site. In other words, the most recent media you added will be at the top the page. Your blog posts listing works the same way.
Try Filtering
One of the ways you can better view what you’ve got going on in your Media Library is by using Filters.
You can filter your content in the List View to show all images, audios, or videos (although, just as a rule of thumb, don’t ever upload video and try to stream it straight from your webhost. You’ll be much better off using a 3rd party video streaming service like YouTube or Vimeo. Most web hosts just aren’t cut out to playback video with any amount of speed, and it will be painful and choppy to watch. )
You can also filter by month, so if you’re looking for that cute cat picture you know you uploaded last Spring, you can pretty easily pull up just what was uploaded for March or April.
HINT: If you’re on the List View, Be sure to click the FILTER button after you choose something from one of the dropdowns to actually make it update your view.
Or try a quick sort
Again, in the Filter View, if you hover over the column headings (where it says “File,” “Author,” “Uploaded To,” etc.) Clicking on the little down arrow next to the heading lets you do a quick sort either alphabetically (or by date). Click the arrow again, and it reverses the sort.
Bulk Delete
The Media Library allows you to easily delete lots of images, too. If you’re like me, you’ve likely uploaded the same image a half a dozen times when you’re working on a blog post because for one reason or another, it wasn’t quite right. And in the interest of being tidy in your spice cabinet, it’s nice to clean up the ones you know you’re not going to use.
Be super careful about this because even if something shows as “unattached”, that just means it wasn’t uploaded and used in a blog post or page. It’s entirely possible it was uploaded another way like via the theme Customizer or another plugin. But if you’re confident you want that batch of images gone, select the lot of them, choose DELETE PERMANENTLY from the Bulk Actions dropdown menu. Then click the APPLY button and they’re outa there!
Searching
But where WordPress really excels with the Media Library is the search engine. Any information you entered about the media item when you uploaded it including the Title, Alt Text, and Description, WordPress will remember and you can use that word or phrase to search and find it again.
One More Tip Before We Wrap it Up
Did you know you can add images to the Media Library simply by dragging them from your file manager on your computer and dropping them straight onto the open Media Library screen? (For that matter, this works in your blog post editor, too. Instead of using ADD MEDIA, you can just drag an image and drop it into your editor and Bam! you’ve got an image in your post.) Sure you can use the Add New button still, but who’s got time for that?
Let’s Take a Scenic Tour Through the Media Library
In the screencast below, we’ll take a quick tour through the Media Library and see some of this in action.
Keep an eye out for the next installment of Beyond the Words where we’ll look at actually adding images to the Media Library and some of the neat things WordPress can do with those images (that you probably didn’t know WordPress was even capable of)!
