Managing Your Media (Library)

Did you know that when you have a WordPress site, you have a library? It’s called your Media Library and it’s full of every photo, video, or audio file you’ve ever uploaded to your site.

Why is this important?

Well, sometimes you work on a post, upload a photo, insert the photo, and then delete everything you wrote in the post, or you forget to insert the photo, and then you need to insert it again. What I frequently see on sites is that the author assumes that because the photo is no longer in the content, it needs to be uploaded again. And again.

Good news! It’s not true!

If you need to use an image that you know you’ve already uploaded when you created your post/page, when you’re on the Insert Media dialogue page, just click the dropdown menu and change it to “Uploaded to this page”. Instead of seeing every photo you ever uploaded to your site, you’ll see just the ones you added to the page you’re editing, like this:
If you use a photo you already uploaded, you get bonus points for not adding extra files to your server.

For even more bonus points, you can take this same approach if you want to use a photo that you uploaded to use on a completely different post or page. I know you’ve been adding titles and alt text to your photos, so when the Insert Media dialogue comes up, just use the search box in the upper right corner and search for the image you want. It totally works.

Sometimes you may find that you uploaded a photo and then needed a do over because you edited the image. To avoid confusion, I recommend that you take the time to delete the old image before you upload the new one. It’s easy–just select it and there is a link under its information that says “Delete Permanently”. You can also delete images from the Media Library itself, which can be handy if you need to delete many images at once. It works very similarly to deleting posts from your site.

Not a big tip this time, but I know it will come in handy for some of you!