Images liven up a blog post but there are many ways to add them. As always, make sure you have the “Kitchen Sink” open. Do that automatically any time you post so that you can SEE the options that are available to you. (Remember that hovering over icons tells you their purpose and/or function.) Let’s use the first icon next to the Upload/Insert words above the kitchen sink rows. First, place your cursor where you want the image to be.
I’m going to use the Add an Image icon. 
Select the image, click upload, then without doing any formatting, select the size. Images do not have to be enormous to be effective so I chose a thumbnail size. Scroll down to the bottom of this window and click Insert into post. The result is what you see above. No placement, plopped on the page, just where I left off typing. So now let’s make it a little more effective.
Close up from my Geraniums painting Same image, placed alongside text, formatted to have the text wrap around it and a title added. This time, place your cursor in front of the first word of your paragraph before uploading the image. To create this effect I aligned the image LEFT so that text would be alongside and would wrap around if it was lengthy. I added the wording in the caption field, and I set the URL link to none so that it would not show a larger image when clicked. To edit an image simply left click on it. Two icons will pop up – one to edit, the other to delete.
When images are uploaded they go into both media and gallery files. There are many types of galleries and I prefer a plug-in gallery rather than the built in one, but it does have its uses so let’s try that one now. Let’s say we want a row of thumbnail images and we don’t need text and we don’t want to bother with tables. We just want to pop some photos in quickly.
Add your images. If you use cntrl+left click you can select a group of images. After uploading, click on the Gallery tab at the top.
- Select whether you want to link to Image or Attachment Page. [Image shows just the image in a new window - attachment page places the image nicely on a blog page.]
- Select your sort order.
- Select the number of columns you want. Caveat: Columns MUST fit within the defined space so the more columns, the smaller the thumbnails will be.
- Select Insert Gallery and the results are below. Magic!
To change the gallery layout, EDIT the gallery by clicking on the gallery itself – looks like a light blue square – find the image icon at the top left corner – change the number of columns until it is the way you like it. The gallery above has the images set to Attachment Page. I think it looks nicer and I wanted you to see that cupcake in detail. *g*
To delete an image from the gallery, Edit the gallery, and over to the right, under Actions you will see “Show“. Find delete down the page, then continue. Be aware that it will delete the image from everywhere, so if you have used it elsewhere on your blog, you will now have a broken image.
You must have a current version of WordPress to use these features.
So go have fun. Next week we’ll explore another type of gallery, inserting a YouTube video and answer any questions you might have. They might be separate posts! Email me or post on Facebook so that I don’t miss something you might need to know now!