Managing Your Media Library
A key part of web content management is organizing and using media. All UMW sites using the WordPress editor have a media library for that site that houses any images or documents that are uploaded.
Accessing the Media Library
To access the media library for your site, login to your WordPress dashboard and look on the left-hand navigation for the word “Media”. Clicking that will take you to the media library for your site. From here, you will have the option to select an image or document that has been uploaded to view more details about it including:
- File name
- Upload date
- The user who uploaded it
- Dimensions of the image
- File type
- File size
- File URL*
This is also where you should add your alt text for images. Be sure to do this as you upload images to ensure that all photos have alt text. If you use photos on your pages that do not have alt text, you will also be able to enter alt text on an as-needed basis in the page editor.
*The File URL field is where you can copy the URL for a document to link on a page on your site. Click the “Copy to clipboard” button to copy the URL, open the page where you want the link to go, and insert the link by highlighting selected text to hyperlink or using the Buttons Block.
Uploading Media
You can also upload new media from the media library. At the top of the media library screen, click the button that says “Add Media” to open a media bin. You can drag and drop images or documents into the bin the upload them immediately, or you can click the “Select Files” button inside the bin to browse your folders for the media you want to upload. There will also be text in the bin that will say, “Maximum upload file size: # MB” with # representing the number of MB that a single file is allowed to be when you upload it. If your file is larger than the allowed maximum, you will need to reduce the file size.
It is important to note that video media should not be uploaded directly to your media library. All videos should be hosted through a source like YouTube or Vimeo and embedded on your page or linked to from there.