Effectively Managing Images in WordPress – Ways & Plugins!
An Image is Worth a Thousand Words. With the effective use of images, even a complex information can be presented in an appealing and readable manner.
In this article, we will be discussing the ways to effectively manage the images in wordpress and the plugins you can use.
Adding Alt and Title attributes
These are important attributes to make the image search engine friendly. Adding these tags not only helps the engines but is equally beneficial for the users. This will become clear with the following explanation:
Alt attribute or Alternative Text – It comes handy in case the image fails to appear or load . It provides a description of what an image is all about. and helps in sidelining accessibility issues and proves helpful especially for the visually impaired users.
Title – This attribute also contains a brief description displaying some informative text about the image when it is hovered over by the user.
While alt text describes the image in detail, the title tag simply states what the image is. However both are important as they optimize the image.
Adding Caption and Description
WordPress offers a simple way to provide a caption that displaysalong with the image and one can also add a description of the image.
Image Sizing
WordPress offers useful features under Media Settings to set the size of an image. It offers thumbnail, medium and large size along with the option to embed the images.
Using Featured Images
Feature image enhanced the visual appeal of the post and user can get a gist of the post, even without reading it. With this feature, author only needs to select and upload an image as a feature image and the rest will be done by WordPress. Only WordPress 2.9 or higher version support this feature.
Galleries for Multiple Images
Creating galleries is the best way to show multiple images to the users which are relevant to the post. The Gallery feature in WordPress offers the flexibility to include or exclude images from the post as may be prefer by the author.
The strongest feature of the wordpress is its plugins. Plugins makes the wordpress more flexible and easy to use. Here are few Image Management WordPress plugins:
This image gallery plug-in is quite popular for the wide range of features it offers. With this plug-in, it is just so easy to create a slideshow of images. It comes with excellent role setting, watermark function, JavaScript effects and offer Meta data support and Tag support for images.
As the name suggests, the plug-in is useful to add watermark to the uploaded images on a WordPress blog or site. It also allows customizing the appearance of the watermark and offers the flexibility to choose the desired position for the watermark on the image.
WP Photo Album
Simple and effective plug-in from WordPress, it allows managing Photo albums in a much easy way. For those who wish to handle things in an uncomplicated manner, this plug-in is the best to use.
This plug-in is excellent that enables creating rotating image galleries. The galleries so created can be further customized as it offers several useful options.
An excellent plug-in that can be used to categorize the posts and add tags to them; the plug-in offers a lot of other useful options as well. It makes Image Tagging a much simpler task.
So a blogger/site owner can now set aside the worries of managing images with WordPress. The above mentioned tools and plugins can provide the required help and can ease the work.
We hope that the information presented in this write –up proves helpful. We would love to have the comments and suggestions from the readers.
