Love to take pictures and add them to your posts?
Great! Adding images to your posts is a great help for you, from SEO to being more visually appealing to your readers. Help your post stand out from the crowd.

You take great photos and you take many photos to give your readers those little details about a trip report, lounge review, etc. How can you get all those photos in there but not overwhelm your readers with 20+ images? This LEARN lesson is to show you some great ways to keep all 20+ images in your post but not make it scroll to the bottom of the internet.

Compare these two posts. They both have 20+ images in their post. Guess which one has more? Guess which one is easier for your reader to follow along? I had to slice up the sites. The first is only two slices for the entire post of 20+ images. The second required 4 (really 5) to show you their entire post. Sure makes for some long scrolling.

What I want to show you is how to keep all those photos, even letting the reader see each image almost full screen.

You’ve used that button, but did you notice all the options that are available? It’s not just a button to get that image in your post. It’s a way to control how that image shows up in your post. How big is it? Does it align to the right, center, or left? Is there a caption to help describe in more detail what you are sharing with your readers?

Did you know you can click multiple images to insert versus one at a time?

Did you know you can pick them in any order as your click on the photos? A check box will appear after you pick one, click and again and you can remove it from your list.

Did you know you can rearrange the photos after you’ve clicked what you wanted? Maybe you clicked the first 5 photos but realize they uploaded out of sequence. Just drag the little images at the bottom to the order your want.

What’s the right size image? Depending on how you are using the image, the first image of the post, the right aligning, etc. will tell you what to do. A first image really should span the width of your content area. We can help you figure out that exact number, but one way to figure it out is to add an image and then size it down until it fits just right.

You’ll want to start big vs small. If you make a small image larger, it will get blurry as WordPress creates a set of images at sizes. You see them when you insert media – Thumbnail, Medium, Large, Full size. Let us say our content width is 650 pixels wide. You’ll want to find an image of that size or a bit bigger.

As you can see below, we’ve inserted an image and selected the Large – 1024 x 819 because the Medium image is only 300 x 239. If you first select the Large and insert it, then you can edit the image by clicking on the pencil icon over the image to bring up the settings. Now there will be an option for Custom Size in the drop-down list. WordPress changed how all this looked a few months back, but it really made things easier in the end. Now you get a Width x Height box. You can type any number in the Width box, in our example, we said 650 pixels was the width of the blog content. The cool feature is that typing 650 in the width box will make the Height automatically adjust proportionally. No need for fancy math. Save and you will now have an image that’s the true full width of your content area.

So you add images, but did you realize to the left is an option to create a quick gallery of a set of images? It’s in the same spot and works the same way as adding images to your posts.

Clicking on Create Gallery won’t look much different than Insert Media. Click on the photos you want and click the Create Gallery button at the bottom. You’ll be taken to a page with some settings for your gallery.

The use of a gallery has so many benefits to a great-looking post, but most importantly, a post that’s easy to read for your blog readers. Galleries will allow you to keep your message in your reader's vision but also show those beautiful visuals that tie into that great writing. The example below shows a 5-wide 150 x 150 px gallery. It’s made up of the photos related to that content in that area of the post. A few galleries would allow your readers to not be inundated by all your photos at once. Their eyes get to settle in and read but know there are some great visuals tied to what they are reading.

Another great benefit of galleries is that we can tie a lightbox effect to sets of galleries. This allows for a five-image gallery here, but farther down the post, 10 more images are to be shown in a gallery, keeping the reader's spot in the article.

Lightbox plugins are an easy solution to allow your reader to see the great images you are posting even large. The benefit is that you can show smaller images and as we discussed above, small sets of galleries. Another benefit is that your reader keeps their place. You are not taking them to another page or tab to show the image, but just bringing it to the front. Once they’ve finished this set of images, they are exactly where they left off and get back to reading the rest of your post.

We can help install and set up the plugin for you. Just contact help@boardingarea.com and we can get it working for you.
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WordPress also has captions. We encourage you to take some of that content and tie it right to the photo. When the reader clicks on the photo, there are some great details about that photo, and next, you can share it with your readers.