WordPress Feature: Managing Media

In your Admin Panel on WordPress, you’ll find the Media tab about halfway down.  What’s there?  That’s where you’ll store all your videos and pictures under 2MB.  It’s not just for storage, though.  It’s also easy to find, delete, and edit your media content.

Finding your Media

There are a multitude of ways to find a specific picture or video.  The fastest and easiest is to simply use the search box in the top right corner.  Sometimes though, you don’t know what to search.  Luckily, you can further narrow things down with the drop down menus at the top.  You can filter the type of content (image, video, audio, etc.) or the month it was uploaded.  Sometimes though, even that’s not enough.  It’s then that you need to press the List button in the top left corner of the screen so that the view turns from grid-style to list-style.

After you’ve done that, you can search by File (the name of the file), Author (who uploaded the content), Uploaded to (where the content has been used), Comments (the amount of comments on the content) or Date (when the content was uploaded).

Deleting your Media

Deleting your media is a pretty simple task and can be done in bulk very quickly.  If you’re in grid-style, just click bulk select at the top, pick the images you want to delete, and click delete selected.

Similarly, if you’re in list-style, just click bulk actions, delete permanently, and again pick which images to delete.

It’s important to note that deleting media means it will not appear anywhere on your site.  Be careful when deleting important media as it may affect your website’s look.

Editing your Media

Editing media is pretty easy, too.  Simply click on your media content and you’ll be able to change the url, title, caption, alt text, and description.  If you need to change more, you can click edit more details at the bottom.

After you’re on the image page, click edit under the picture and you can change dimensions of the image, crop it, or just apply simple sizing to it.

There’s not a lot you can do to edit your media, as WordPress’ goal isn’t for image modifications.  If you need to do more, there are tons of free and paid programs to do so, including ones that will let you add logos or alter everything in images.