How to Manage Your WordPress Blog’s Media Settings

In some of my other posts here at For Bloggers, By Bloggers, I have walked you through various settings in WordPress. In this one, we’ll look at the Settings > Media.

Although there aren’t a ton of decisions to make, let me explain why you may want to revisit these settings. Here is a screen shot of what you will see if you have a self-hosted WordPress blog:

Image Sizes: 

Every time you insert an image into a post or page, you will find these three sizes—thumbnail, medium and large— and of course, the original size, as your options. This is the place where you can manage those sizes. You may be asking why you would want to do that (because once you’ve placed an image, you can always resize it).

But here is  the advantage of using these settings. Let’s say you have a blog that you are using to record your travels. And when you insert an image, you want them all to be the same size every time, to fit your post width. With these settings, you can play around to find that perfect size, and then set the “Max Width” for that amount. That way, all photos fill the width of the post and you don’t have to mess with them.

You can also control your thumbnails, and choose to have them cropped or just sized down proportionally, so you have some white space horizontally or vertically.

Just remember: your theme options may override some of these, especially your thumbnail size. You will find this happens more on the home page of a theme that is widgetized and allows you extra control on thumbnail sizes.

Embeds

This is pretty straightforward. I suggest keeping the first box checked, unless you use a plugin to embed videos. And the “Maximum embed size” can come in handy. For example, when you embed video, some services give you an option to change the size, others put in a default width. What this will do, is if you put in a “width” size, you can make sure no video is embedded larger than you want— or wider than the width of your post area.

Uploading Files

I recommend leaving this as default, unless your developer has set this up differently. It’s one of those features I find best to leave alone. Also, checking the box allows them to be put into folders by month and year, which could help you down the road if you ever uploaded the folders to your computer and were searching for something specific.