How to Quickly Edit Images in WordPress
If you ever uploaded an image to WordPress with the intention of adding it to a page or post, chances are the image in question needed a bit of extra polishing in order to look perfect. In an ideal scenario, before uploading your images to WordPress, you will use Photoshop to give them the extra touch. Besides changing the image size in Photoshop, you may, as well, use this program to crop the image or change its canvas size. Luckily, this can be easily done in the WordPress Media Library. Today we’ll show you how to quickly edit images in WordPress, and we’ll introduce you to all the related options available.
Media Library
The Media Library is where you can add and manage all your media. You can reach it by going to Media > Library in your WordPress dashboard. Once you’re there, just click on the media item that you wish to edit.
Edit Media
After selecting the media item that you wish to edit, you will see the Edit more details button on the right side of the screen. Upon clicking it, you gain access to the Edit Media page.
To make sure you get all the options shown in the picture below, you need to open the Screen Options at the top of the screen and mark all the available fields.
There are several settings you can customize in the Edit Media screen. We’ll go through all of them below.
- Title – this is where you can insert the name of your media item. The title is usually displayed in the file section of the Media Library and can also be shown on attachment pages and galleries.
- Permalink – this is the URL you can use to link to this media item. There may also be a button here that lets you edit the permalink. If not, you can mark the Slug checkbox in Screen Options and change the link in the “Slug” field.
- Edit Image – clicking this button allows you to make additional changes to your image. We’ll talk about this particular option in more detail later.
- Caption – you can use this field to add a caption to your media item.
- Alternate Text – this option is used for ease of access. It’s where you can assign an alternative label to your media item.
- Description – here you can further describe your media.
There is also a Save meta box on the right side of the screen that displays all the media information, such as the upload date, file URL, file name, size, type, and dimensions. It also allows you to choose whether you want to delete your file permanently or update your changes.
Other Media Options
The additional media options only become visible if you previously enabled them in the Screen Options tab. These options include Discussion, Comments, Slug and Author.
Discussion lets you enable or disable the ability to leave comments, while the Comments option shows a list of recent comments for the media file in question. We’ve already mentioned the Slug option earlier – you can use it to edit the permalink. And last but not least, with the Author option, you can choose the author of your media.
You should note that all the information that you add in the Edit Media page is used by attachment pages and galleries, provided the theme or plugin allows to show it. Once you add the image as a separate image into a page or post, it is detached from the data in the Media Library, and you can use the Edit option on the image itself to access the Image Details screen. There you can change its caption, alternative text, display settings, and a few other advanced options that let you update each image individually.
Edit Image
The button that leads to the Edit Image screen is located right below the picture itself. Once there, you will see that, apart from the possibility of adding the usual data (title, caption, alt text, and description), you also have basic editing options at your disposal. These include rotating, scaling, and cropping.
- Scale Image – this option serves for scaling the original image proportionally. In order to get the best results, you should scale your image before you do any cropping, flipping, or rotation. You should also note that you can only scale down the images, not up. Once you’re done, hit the Scale button, and your newly scaled image will be displayed instead of the original. Also, if you decide to restore the image to its original size, the Restore Original Image button that appears after an image has been scaled will let you do this.
- Crop – to crop the image, you need to click and drag on the image to select the part that you wish to crop. When you’re done, click the crop icon in the top left corner above the image to save your selection.
- Image Crop – when combined with the crop icon, this option helps you make more accurate changes to your image. The Aspect Ratio lets you specify the aspect ratio of your crop selection if you hold down the Shift key while dragging. There are also Selection fields inside which you can change the values in pixels if you’ve already started your cropping. These values are scaled to roughly match the dimensions of the original.
Aside from the aforementioned options, you can also rotate your image clockwise, counter-clockwise, flip it vertically or horizontally, and use Undo/Redo buttons to remove or return to the previous edit. Of course, there are also Save and Cancel options that are pretty self-explanatory.
Conclusion
And that officially wraps up our tutorial on how to quickly edit images in WordPress. Although this platform doesn’t support the advanced options photo editing programs usually have, it still contains all the basic editing features that should be more than enough to make your images look clean and presentable. Go ahead and try it out!
We hope this article was helpful. If you liked it, feel free to check out some of these articles as well!