BLOGGING FOR FREEDOM |
UPLOADING PICTURES IN WORDPRESS |
WordPress does not handle photos with impressive fluency. That’s being gracious; it has no fluency at all compared to many hosted blog services. There is no such thing as a photo gallery created with native WordPress tools. (By native, I mean the administrative pages built into the WordPress program.) Inserting a photo in a blog entry?
It’s not easy, but it can be done. This section explains how. WordPress is not a good program choice for casual or low-effort photo blogging. Because of the program’s deficiencies in this regard, several developers have written plugins that supposedly make selecting and including photos alittle easier. (See the preceding section for information about plugins.)
Alas,all the plugins we have tried require specialized knowledge, demand too much work to configure, or simply don’t function well. The server is the Internet computer where your blog resides as well as all the blog components and pieces of content. In hosted blog services, the blog program, the blog itself, and the blog components all reside on the service’s computer. If you use a selfinstalled program such as WordPress or Movable Type, the program, the blog, and the components reside on the computer of your Web host.
In all these scenarios, putting a photo on a blog requires two basic steps:Upload the photo to the server Assign the photo from the server to the blog The exact process differs among programs, but the result is the same: A photo residing on a server is displayed in a blog residing on the same server.
In WordPress, you can upload files of all sorts, including photos, to a directory on your server that is preset to receive files, and then assign those photos to blog entries. It is possible to make uploads go to a different directory from the preset one, but because this entire photo process is so complicated, we’ll avoid the extra complexity of changing the directory. This first set of steps examines how to upload photos. The next set of steps describes how to display them in a blog entry. Follow these steps to upload a photo:
You may copy and paste it using the Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V keyboard commands. This step might seem finicky, but it is crucial. The address in the box must match the recommended addres.
Take a breather. Uploading a photo is the first part of getting it into your blog.The second part is inserting the photo in an entry. The first three steps in the preceding list apply only to the first time you upload a file. WordPress installs with uploading capability disabled, and those three steps enable it. Once enabled, uploading stays enabled unless you disable it. So, starting with your second photo upload, begin the process with the fourth step. All right, enough sitting around. Let’s move on to inserting a photo in a blog entry. The problem with WordPress in this department is that it doesn’t provide a photo-browsing tool on the Write Post page. You need to manually place the
address of the uploaded photo in the post, surrounded by the proper display tags. We left off on Step 9 on the File uploaded! page, showing a line of code for displaying the uploaded photo. For now, ignore the lack of code for the
thumbnail; we’ll work with the full-sized file.