One of the most commonly asked support questions I receive is “How do I get my images to look right in my post”, or “I can’t resize my images once I’ve loaded them into a post”.
Take a couple of minutes in your Media Settings, and you’ll save a lot of heart ache later!
In your Dashboard, go to Settings > Media. Once here, you can set up what size images you would like to add to your posts. Your three choices are: Thumbnail, Medium, and Large Size.
I work a lot with the Modern Blogger Pro theme, and the optimal image width for this theme, if you are you using one sidebar, is 700px, so I have set my “large image” size to be 700px wide by 500px high. Save your changes.
So, now you are ready to write you post, and add some media. Click the little “camera” icon to add your image, and you’ll be directed to the “Insert Media” screen. From here, once you have selected the image you would like to display, you’ll see the “Attachment Display Settings” pane. Here, you will have the choice to insert your image as thumbnail, medium, large, or full size. If you pick “large”, your image will be the perfect size for your post, and no additional manipulation of the image is necessary.
As a rule of thumb, I also recommend installing, activating, and running the Regenerate Thumbnails plugin; this will resize your images to adjust to the featured image sizes of your new theme.
Also, I can’t stress this often enough:
The number one suggestion I can make to you is to upload appropriate size images to your media library. If you upload images directly from your cell phone, for example, chances are that they are going to be much larger than you are ever going to want to display. Yes, you can change them via the attachment settings when you are adding them to your posts (as shown above), but in the meantime, you site will start to slow down because you have so much “bloat”, with all those humongous images just sitting in your media library. (Did you see in the example above, my image was loaded at over 5000 px wide? I only did that for purposes of this post – I always edit and resize my images down to 1000px wide BEFORE adding it to my media library.
Won’t that make your life easier?
If you *still* want the ability to edit images within your posts, I have an updated post here (link)
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