Cool Tips With Images on WordPress.com

~ Veselin

I have some ideas to share with you, based on my last 24 hours of blogging.

Add Images as Galleries

Have you noticed that when you blog a single image, it’s not clickable and stays small? Like this:

It’s a very large and pretty image but nope, can’t click.

And this is clickable (well, at least clickable from the website veselin.blog):

I used the Image block for the first and the Gallery for the second. So if you want your image to be clickable, use the Gallery instead of Image for single images as well.

You can type /gallery in the editor to quickly find the block. It will appear after /ga or /gal.

You Can Post Photo Comments

This only works when you go to the person’s site and post a comment from WordPress, and not the Reader or the comment notification. The Gutenberg Editor for comments supports adding an Image block where you can copy/paste an address pointing to an image. Just select reputable sources for your images or they might go away soon.

Use Featured Images for Your Posts

The latest version of the Jetpack Mobile app no longer uses the first image from the post on the Mobile Reader and this will likely cause lower engagement with your posts on Mobile if you don’t manually add featured images. The following screenshot shows 2 posts with a featured image, and two without. Despite having a photo on your site, it will only be viewed after a click. Will anyone click a post called “Stesi” with no explanation and no photo? Probably not.

Note that the web Reader is unaffected and will still show your first image as featured without doing this.

Resize Images Before Uploading

It’s very easy to consume all of your space if you don’t resize the photos before uploading them. The default photos that my phone generates are 5-9MB each. Scaling them down to 2000x1500px makes one photo under 1MB and I can upload more than 1000 photos per GB of used space.

Do you have any tips about using images on your blog?

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Published by Veselin

I ❤️ WordPress

43 thoughts on “Cool Tips With Images on WordPress.com”

  1. That’s so great that you shared this! So many don’t know about how to use images on their blogs. And hey, Veselin! I’m back officially. Well, without a blog, but with a WordPress account. Apparently you can create a WordPress account but without a blog, so I did that. I’ve missed my guys so much that I had to create this account when I found this out.

    I don’t know how active I’ll be, though, but I’ll be here as often as possible ❤️

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  3. It’s very easy to consume all of your space if you don’t resize the photos before uploading them. The default photos that my phone generates are 5-9MB each. Scaling them down to 2000x1500px makes one photo under 1MB and I can upload more than 1000 photos per GB of used space.

    Huh, I’m surprised we do not offer to do that by default. Seems like a quick win all around.

    The latest version of the Jetpack Mobile app no longer uses the first image from the post on the Mobile Reader

    And another TIL! Thank you for sharing.

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  5. Just as an fyi, you CAN make an image block picture clickable. You just have to add the url to it by clicking the link button once you’ve added it to your post.

    I also have some thoughts on resizing and space, but they are linked to two posts of mine. Before I go getting all link happy, is it ok if I put both of the links in a reply to this comment?

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      3. You are welcome. Anything that can help someone on WP is of interest to me. ESPECIALLY since they cut the storage space for new people to 1gb. That was just a total *selfcensored~ move on WP’s part…

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      5. Btw I used to be a paid subscriber to Dropbox. It stopped working while also preventing the OS from syncing images. Their support acknowledged the problem but didn’t fix it. So I’d say resize your images 🙂

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      6. Oh, I only use the free version of dropbox online. I ONLY use it as additional storage space for pix. Anything over 150K and I link by url to the pix in the post. Saves me a lot in the long run.
        But that is why I did the two posts. Sometimes both work for people (like me) but sometimes only one or the other is a viable option.

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  6. I’ve liked Images to Image File and it allows an image to be clickable. Or do I misunderstand what you’re explaining?
    However there is a new problem and that’s with comments. I wasn’t able to comment on your website and had to go to Reader. This is happening for a few bloggers right now.
    Maggie

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      1. Google chrome, but it happens from my phone too if I’m on the website. It is happening to quite a few people, I’ve had comments from followers on my posts that they had to leave messages other ways. The screen goes white except for a caption at the top that says something like Not Allowed. Comment not sent.
        I’ll take a screenshot next time. It happened on your blog today.

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    1. Okay, I’ll do a detailed test of both my and your blog in the morning. In case I manage to replicate this issue, I’ll report it to the right engineers. Thanks for letting me know, I had no idea. Never happened to me but I rarely leave the mobile app for comments.

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      1. Hi, I know this is your personal blog, but just wondering if you were able to look into this? It is still happening and occurs in about 50% of the comments I try to make. Maggie

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      3. I think I managed to reproduce one problem, which is the text “Sorry, this comment could not be posted.” when posting on one of your posts. Reloading the page fixed it and I couldn’t reproduce after that.

        Is that what you see?

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  11. WP does offer a few edit features for images, like removing edges and focusing on the most important part of the photo. Sometimes I transfer a photo to Canva.com. They provide even more features for producing a near-perfect image. Then it’s a matter of downloading the photo to your computer so it can be accessed by WP.

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