Adding An Image to Your Wordpress Post
Item 4: Adding an Image to Your Wordpress Post
It is quite easy to add images - photographs or graphics - to Wordpress posts, but it is important to keep a few things in mind. First, add images that are properly sized before being embedded in your blog posts. For example, if you want to embed an image you just recently shot with your digital camera, don’t just bring it in at 800 x 600 pixels, or whatever was its original size. That is too large for the typical blog column width.
Rather, downsize it to a more manageable 400 x 300, or some other similar size. Here is a sample of an image that is 400 x 300 pixels:
You might even think this is too large. If so, downsize it using image manipulation software such as Adobe Photoshop. Or use one of the many online image resizing sites such as resizr.com or picresize.com - many of these sites will also let you crop your image too. And some will help you make adjustments to brightness and contrast, and sometimes even to the color balance of the image.
Once your picture is properly sized, cropped and adjusted, be sure to save it on your local computer so it is available for uploading.
To embed the image in a Wordpress post you will have to upload it to a web server - either the server where you blog is located, or to another server where you can “hotlink” it. “Hotlinking” is a technique where an image already online located on a server somewhere is placed into to your own webpage.
For example, if you wanted to show an image found on some other site, you could just drag and drop from the original location into the “Write Post” form and it would then show up in your blog post. Here is an example of an image brought in from a completely different website:
You can do the same thing in HTML view by finding the address of the image you want to embed and then entering the code as follows:
<img src=”http://www.linknet-promotions.com/images/LBN-membership-250.jpg” border=”0″ alt=”Membership Card for Link Builder Network” />
Hot linking like this should only be done when there are no restrictions against doing it for a specific image. Many images are copyright and should therefore not be hotlinked. In other cases the owners of the originating website object to the practice of hotlinking because it increases their bandwidth usage. The best way to hotlink an image is to upload it to a website of your own.
