The Blogmistress

Using WordPress for your website and blogging

Where to get images for your WordPress blog posts

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Many of us need and want to know where to find and how to add great images to our WordPress blog posts and pages.

small__4858679343Pictures can take a add polish to good blog, making it a great blog; using quality images is important. Simply using images from a Google image search is not a good idea (unless you want to ensure the copyright situation for the images you find and want to use), nor is copy/pasting scrappy-looking clipart from Word, etc.

There are a many ways to include images legally and we make frequent use of the following:

Fotolia for when you want a polished, specifically created image – yes, it costs a from £1.20 for each image, but you choose exactly what you want and know you are legally allowed to use the image. The downside of Fotolia is that many images look staged and obviously “stock” images (not created specifically for you).

Photopin offers images shared freely through Flickr by the photographers. You need to include the credit details for the photographer – this information and link is provided for you to copy/paste to your post or page. You can read how to use Photopin for your WordPress blog here.

And Stock.xchng is still worth a browse for good no-charge, royalty-free photographs.

Just don’t, whatever you do, use images you find in the Google image search – that is not a good idea unless you want to track down and request permission.

There a few plugins that will help you find images too – have a browse if you like (search within Plugins, Add New) but be aware of any links that may need to be included or that your website doesn’t slow down as a result.

This should cover most of your needs, however we’ll take a look at options to create images and how to resize them. And if you use a good image source, please share…

One other thing – be careful not to spend too much time trying to find the perfect image – before you know it, half an hour has passed in enjoying wonderful images!

Babs

photo credit: Clover_1 via photopin cc

How to use Photo Pin to add an image to your WordPress blog post or page

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photopinAdding an image to a blog post or to a website page is a “good thing”. Ideally relevant to the content, a photo or picture can draw the reader in by breaking up the text and making the whole page more readable.

One thing you must not do, however, is use other people’s images without their permission. Google Images is not the place to find your images. Instead go to Photo Pin and find something suitable there, download the best size for your needs (larger if your home page shows a larger image, perhaps in a slider), copy and paste the credit into your page/post, and away you go.

The following video takes you through how to add an image from Photopin to a blog post:

Help! My file won’t upload to WordPress

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You want to upload a great image, or a pdf file, or a spreadsheet, or a …. The list goes on. We can share files through our WordPress blogs and websites using the Media, Add New option in the Dashboard – not just images.

Sometimes, however, we may get the message “Error saving media attachment.” or we are told that the file is too big – this latter make it nice and clear where the problem lies, but that first one can have us stumped – yes, us too – just the other week we had this and did not look at the most likely reason straightaway – hence this post!

“Error saving media attachment.”

The first thing to do is check the settings. In your Dashboard go to Settings, Media and look in the Uploading Files section, the Store uploads in this folder. WordPress tells you that the default is wp-content/uploads and if you have something different to this, change it. Most times this will be the cause of the problem.

Of course there may be other reasons but for those we’d generally want to dig a bit deeper and look at permissions and things – for those we usually Google the issue or pop to the WordPress.org forum to see what others have done with the same problem. We’re always here to help if you want to run it by us – pop an email to hello@blogmistress.com with as much information as you can and we’ll take a look.

If your file is too big

Your file is bigger than your server is set up to allow. Let’s face it, if we were allowed to upload files of any size willy-nilly, our lovely WordPress blog or website would soon be creaking.

So – how do you know if your file is too big? Well when you go to upload your image you should be able to see how big it is in bytes (take a look at the video).

How do you know how big a file you’re allowed to upload? If you go to Media, Add New it will tell you the Maximum Upload file size there.

If you have a once-off need to upload a bigger file, you can of course do it the old-fashioned “manual” way using FTP, but do have a think about how long your file may take to load.

If you want to be able to upload larger files regularly, you’ll need to change the settings and may need to talk to your hosts about that. We’ll cover this in another blog post soon.

If you’re ever unsure, just ask the team here and we’ll help you.

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