Images Galore!

Posted by Bryan on September 24, 2008 under Theme Help |

This is just a post to show you what some images will look like in your finished site when you add them using WordPress’ cool built-in image uploading functionality. The first one, at the top, is an image that “floats” to the right with the text wrapping around it.

You can change the default image sizes under the Settings > Miscelleneous area of the WordPress Admin area and there are plugins available to refresh all images on your site should you ever change these settings. Just remember that images are sized by WordPress as you upload them, so if you change your mind on the size later, you’ll need to change your code by re-uploading and re-inserting the image.

Just above is an image that’s aligned to the center using the “Add media” tool, and after the next paragraph are some images as thumbnails aligned to the left, but not using the “Left” alignment in the “Add Media” window, but rather with “none” selected next to alignment. Left alignment works similarly, but allows text to wrap around the image, which is fine unless the image is at the end of the article, in which case they will hang off the bottom of the article area.

One hint about WordPress (at least 2.6.*) is that the system automatically uses captions if you fill in the Caption field. We leave that blank. Then, we switch over to HTML view and add in a description of the image where the code says alt=”", between the quotation marks. This “alt” text serves at least 2 functions. One, it shows up if your image cannot be displayed, so at least people know what kind of image was supposed to be there. And second, search engines can’t admire your pictures, but they can catalog what’s in the picture using this “alt” text.