[Video] How to Upload Media to WordPress

Our website maintenance service provides a powerful resource for any website. Though a lot of times we receive requests that we almost feel bad charging for. One of the most popular requests is “can you upload x file to my website?” Of course we can, but we would also like to provide the knowledge of how you can do it as well for FREE.

This lead to the start of our video tutorials or how to’s for WordPress blogs / websites.

This is the first of many videos on WordPress, so make sure to stop back soon.

Learn how to upload media to WordPress and how to use that media once you’ve uploaded it.

Jonathon Moore

4minutes 26seconds

This is a quick WordPress tutorial video on how to walk you through uploading media to your WordPress blog or website.  Here I have a fresh install of WordPress on my local machine, and in this tutorial I’m going to assume that you know how to log in to WordPress and you know how to access your admin area.  I’m already logged in as you can see; so let’s just jump right into this!

I’m going to go over to my admin area and since I’m logged in, it loads right up – my dashboard.  We’re going to go over to the media.. right here – click on the ‘media’ and then what this is, is actually your library.  If you have media loaded into your WordPress installation it will show right here.  As you can see I don’t have anything on this fresh installation.  SO, this button up here; you can click “add new.”  You can also use this “add new” over here, either way it doesn’t matter; I always use this one up here just from habit.

Go ahead and click on the “add new.”  It will load the ‘upload new media’ page.  Now on this page, there are several ways you can upload; they (WordPress) continue to make this easier and easier for you.  So, you can either grab an image; drag and drop it on here, or you can select a file.  Here I have the Webdigia logo on my desktop – just a simple .png file.  Go ahead and click it if you’re using the ‘select file’ uploader, hit open and as you can see it uploads really quick because it is on my local machine.

This is an example of no issues, everything happened perfectly.  Sometimes you will get an error the first time that you are uploading something.  I will have a screencast that will show you how to fix that error as well as, (but for now) you will see a quick screen snippet of what that will look like so you will know to go view that if you get this (error).  If you got past that, then perfect; you can ignore everything I just said regarding that.

What this is, is it’s showing you that the file uploaded, it’s showing the file name, the file type (.png), the date and how big it is; perfect!  From this area you can change the title of it; you can add that SEO alternate text for when people (visitors) don’t have their images turned on – it will show that alternate text.  You can also add a caption and a description for it (your image).  Then it also shows you the location that it has it uploaded on your server.  Everything is fine here; you don’t actually have to change anything here.  Once it’s uploaded, it’s uploaded.  You can grab this URL, take it to any page that you’re working on; if you’re emailing it, you can grab that URL and give them to them – it doesn’t matter.

Using this upload feature you can upload anything as you can see here within a 32MB size.  Now you can change that, but that’s the default size.  You can upload a quick video, if it’s a tutorial; you can upload your PDF files, images, whatever it is; even .SWF files you can upload in here, it’s just going to store it in your uploads section on your website.  Now I have a file uploaded, what can I do to it?

Okay, I already said you can email the link; you can use this link here but let’s make this a little bit simpler.  If you’re working on a page or a post on your website; let’s go look at something real quick.  Jump over here to the pages as I just did, and here since it is a fresh install, I added a contact page, but let’s just go to our homepage real quick.  Here’s an example of a homepage.  This is just a simple page.  If we want to add, say that image, right here – we can go to that page we’re editing and click on this little icon right here that says “add media” (when hovering over the icon).  It’s going to open up the add media panel.

You can also upload media right from here.  You don’t have to go through all those steps we just went through.  You can (also) upload while you’re editing OR if you want to pull a file that you already have uploaded, go over here to the “media library” tab up at the top.  In the media library tab, if you have a bunch of things here it won’t open like this, but since we have only one thing, it’s going to open in an expanded view.  So this is what it will normally look like when you land on this page.

Go ahead if you want, whatever media you want find it, then go over here and click the “show.”  And then it will come down here and give you some more information.  As you can see this is the same thing we saw when we uploaded it the first time, but it has a couple more things.  It has alignment: none, left, center and right; and it also has the size change.  We want this image in here to be to the left of the text and we want it to be the full size.  Once we’ve selected our configuration, click the button that says “insert into post.”  You can see right there, it inserted it (flawlessly) into the post.  If we go over here and say (click) “update” and we go view the page.  You can see that it inserted it right into the post, to the left of the text.