WordPress: Media

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Summary

The ability to add media to a website, whether it be a photo or a PDF, is a requirement now-a-days, and thankfully WordPress makes this task easy. This guide will provide a brief introduction to WordPress media and then detail how to add new media (photos or PDFs), remove media,  and replace existing media with a newer version.

Introduction

Prior to adding any media to a WordPress site it's good to have a solid understanding of how media management works within the Dashboard.

All media for an entire site can be accessed from the Media > Library menu within the dashboard. Since most media will be immediately added to a specific page the Media Library isn't used too often, however know that it is the central hub for managing (finding, adding, removing, replacing, and editing) media files for the entire website. The remainder of this guide will detail how to leverage media while editing a page. Note, if a media file is deleted from the Media Library it will be completely removed from the website, and any links to the file will no longer work properly.

The default view for the Media Library is the grid view, however that can be changed to list view by clicking on the list icon just below the Media Library page title.

Each site also has a media quota, which limits the maximum amount of space that can be used by the site to a certain quantity. The default quota is 300MB. This can be increased as necessary provided proper justification. Also note that each individual file must be 25MB or less. You can monitor the site media quota by viewing the Dashboard and looking at the At a Glance panel.

Media Library Summary

500MB
Total storage space quota

25MB
Maximum individual file size

Allowed Images

  • .jpg
  • .jpeg
  • .png
  • .gif

Allowed Documents

  • .pdf

Allowed Audio

  • .mp3
  • .m4a
  • .ogg
  • .wav

Allowed Video

  • none

We require that videos be embedded into your website and hosted by a third party service, preferring YouTube due to its ease of creating and managing captions.

To add a video to the CSU College of Liberal Arts YouTube account contact Nicolle McMurray and include the following:

  • The video (or a shareable link to the video file in a cloud drive)
  • Caption file (SubRip .srt file)
  • Title
  • Description
  • Tags (optional)

Add Media

There are several methods that can be used to add media to a page, but the most common (and quickest) method is below.

  1. While editing a page click the Add Media button in the upper left corner, just above the standard editor input box. Note, if the media file has already been uploaded to the site then skip to step four.
  2. From the pop-up panel click the Upload Files tab.
  3. From the center of the panel click the Select Files button and locate the media files to upload, and click Open.
  4. Now that the files have been uploaded they should now be selected and you can either modify the selection.
  5. Next, be sure the Attachment Details and Attachment Display Settings are correct. Note, the title for PDFs (or other documents) is what will be used as the hyperlink text. 
  6. Once the correct selection is made and details and display settings are correct simply click Insert into page, in the lower right corner.

Remove Media

  1. While editing a page click the Add Media button in the upper left corner, just above the standard editor input box. Or, from the WordPress dashboard click Media > Library from the left side menu.
  2. Search for the media file to remove, click on it to select it, and then under Attachment Details click Delete Permanently. Note this will removed the file from the entire site.

To remove multiple files at once use the Media Library and click the Bulk Select button.

Replace Media

There are times when a document needs to be replaced with an updated version (such as the current years department code PDF), but uploading the new version and then updating all of the links to the old version simply isn't an option. This's where Media Replace comes in.

  1. While editing a page click the Add Media button in the upper left corner, just above the standard editor input box. Or, from the WordPress dashboard click Media > Library from the left side menu.
  2. Locate the media file that needs to be replaced and click on it to select it.
  3. From the Attachment Details section click the Upload a new file button.
  4. Click the Choose File button, locate your replacement file, and then click the Upload button to replace the media file.
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