Wordpress Wednesdays: Thumbnails and Medium Images
Posted on October 8th, 2008
Pictures can do a lot to provide personality and context to your blog posts, so whenever you have an opportunity to include a relevant image, you should probably do it. If you have more than one picture associated with a blog post, you may want to set up a mini gallery within your article as well, but how do you go about doing all that resizing in a speedy and efficient manner?
You may not have noticed this, but the current build of Wordpress actually has functionality built right in that allows you to do this. When you click on the “add an image” icon near the top right corner of the write post window (it’s just about the text field where you write your blog posts), a window pops up where you can upload an image. After uploading the image, you are provided with a series of options, like adding a title and description, as well as a hyperlink.
Past this, you are given a few options for how you would like to embed the image. There is the thumbnail, medium (default) and full size. The full size image is just that, but how about the thumbnail and the medium-sized image? You can configure the exact dimensions of these options through the settings in Wordpress.
Click on Settings, then Miscellaneous, and you will find an area where you can define the dimensions of thumbnails (including the ability to crop the thumbnail to fit your exact specifications), as well as the maximum width and height of the medium image. This makes it a lot easier to quickly embed images in your post that are just the right dimensions. Go ahead and try it. Your readers will appreciate the consistent layout and user-friendly format.
Posted in WordPress | 324 views
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4 Comments
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I agree. Having image functionality in the new version of Wordpress is very helpful.
I have tried a number of Wordpress plugins to accomplish this, but when Wordpress releases a new version, you are dependent upon the plugin author to release an upgrade—something they didn’t always do. It’s great to have this built in.
The coolest thing about WordPress’ automatically thumbnails are that you can pull them into your template using PHP. Just use a regular expression to pull the image name from the post body, and then output the tag for the thumbnail. I use this to create my own magazine-type homepage.
Great idea, Andrew! Would you mind explaining more about how you do this? That is, where do you put the PHP code?
That is really great feature. Just before I was need to manually change the dimensions in php code and that wasn’t very cool…