Video:

Transcript:

In this video, we're gonna talk about the media library that is built into WordPress. The media 
library allows you to store images, music, video and be able to use them just about anywhere you 
want, posts pages, whatever.
We're looking here at the dashboard and, on the left, there's a media link and here's the library. 
Right now, we all have one thing in it and it's the image from our home page that you saw in an 
earlier video.
Now, right here in the library, you can search your items. You can filter them by type, by date 
uploaded and you can make them look a little different. You can also add new, you can select from 
your home machine, you can see your photos in your finder and simply upload them. Let's upload this 
one and there we are, it's done. Now we can click on it, you can see the image nice and large and 
you can see information about this image. There's the file and the type, when it was uploaded, the 
file size and the dimensions. You can see the URL of the picture itself right here and then there's 
a title. I recommend always putting in alt text. This makes it easier for people with screen 
readers to be able to know what's going on with your images. Here we could view the attachment page,
edit more details or delete permanently. I'm going to click Edit more details. This allows us to 
give the image a title, a caption, there's the alternate text and the description can actually have 
HTML in it.
So now I'm going to hit update without actually changing anything but then I want to go back to here 
and down in the lower left there's a button that says edit image. This allows you to do some very 
rudimentary image editing: you can rotate it and you can flip it and, depending on whether or not 
your server has the right tools, you can crop. Over here you can actually change the size of the 
image, you could crop it and then you could choose to apply changes to only some of the sizes, which 
brings me to a cool thing. When you upload an image, WordPress actually makes multiple sizes of it. 
We're going to take a look at the deep. We're going to take a look at the settings in greater detail 
later but for now let's take a quick look.
Every time you upload an image, it creates a thumbnail size of 150 by 150 pixels a medium size of 
300 by 300 and a large size of 1024 by 1024. Now, these are maximum heights so if you have one that 
is wider than tall it'll keep the aspect ratio. It won't always give you square images. It also 
maintains the original one so that you can work with it later if you need to so. That's how you 
upload and manage images right in the media library, but you can interact with the media library in 
other places. For example, under posts here are our news items here's the classic rock concert in 
the park I'm going to click right here at the beginning of our text and click add media, I'm going 
to upload, and this is very much like the uploader in the media library, and now I can choose 
alignment left, center or right. When you choose left and you can choose to link to nothing linked 
directly to the image link to a page showing the image or a custom URL so you could link to anything.
You could link to Google if you wanted to. I'm gonna leave it at media file and then you can choose 
a size. The full size would be ridiculously large. That would be really painful for people to 
download and view but we can choose large medium and thumbnail. I'm going to choose me and click 
insert into post and there you see it.
So now I'll click update and on the front end you can see our image. But now, what if we want to 
move it to the right? If you click it, there's some options here for alignment and now it's on the 
right. If you click it again and click the pencil, you can edit the caption, the alternate text. You 
could change the alignment, the size, how it links and there's even an Advanced section where you 
can put in some custom CSS items. You can also edit which is just like the Edit we saw before, or 
you can replace it. You can actually put up a different image in place of this one. You can also 
grab the corners of the image and resize it. Now it doesn't actually resize the image it stretches 
it which made me fine in this case it looks just fine but some images don't stretch well so you 
should experiment with that. Let's do one more. I'm going to click here at the top again, click add 
media and now I'm simply going to select an image that's already there and our alt text is already 
there so I can simply insert into post. Except I forgot that I want the large one centered so now I 
click update and it looks like that and that's actually a little bit too big, so I go back and I say 
large is too large so we'll make it medium and float:left which is far more readable for our 
visitors. However, I still left it to click to original. The original is actually very very large 
so people can zoom in if they want to.
The media library can hold more things than just images. Can also hold audio and video, and we'll 
take a look at that in a future video.