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?