When working with the WordPress Media Library, after a few dozen files have been uploaded, one quickly realizes there is a lack of organization and the ability to search for files becomes critical. Unfortunately, out-of-the-box, WordPress only searches for files in the library by their title rather than their filename. Thankfully WordPress sets the title to match the filename when a file is first uploaded so this isn’t necessarily a problem, however if the file title is ever changed to something completely different than the filename it makes it very difficult to find a file to replace it or delete it.

Thankfully, due to WordPress’s extraordinary ease of modification through actions and filters, this is an easily solvable problem. I’ve created a new plugin that will run behind-the-scenes on each of our WordPress Multisite sites that will allow for searching the Media Library by title and filename.

It’s a small change, but one more step towards an even more usable back-end for department Site Managers.