A breakdown of the WordPress image settings

Recently, I posted a query about session topics to a group of attendees of an upcoming indie biz conference that I’ll be speaking at. The responses I’ve received so far line up nicely with my planned curriculum, but I also received the following reply and accompanying screenshot from a crafter named NK:

“I’d like to know what all this stuff means And how should I be labeling it?”

wordpress_media_settings_screenshot

That is a screenshot from the WordPress Insert Media screen. I usually cover this in my WordPress II workshops, and I was writing NK back to say as much, when I remembered that the conference isn’t until April, which meant she would either have to wait til my talk in April or to try to figure out how to properly describe that particular screen and then comb through Google to find a decent answer.

Neither of those are good options!

See, this particular screen is actually kind of important. In terms of Search Engine Optimization, labeling your images is one of the easiest ways to do basic optimization on your website. Also, there are significant differences in the behavior of the fields: for some of the fields, viewers will see the text, for some they won’t and for others the text will be visible, but only if the image is clicked a certain way. Whatever the reason, it’s much better to start using this screen correctly now, rather than having to go back and re-edit 4 months of posts.

To that end, I decided to explain that particular screen right here, right now, no waiting for April.

wordpress_media_settings_screenshot_labeled

First, some context. This is the sidebar of the Insert Media screen that appears when using the “Add media” function in a WordPress page or post.

1. Title

This field will auto-populate with the name of the image file. So if your file is named “kitten.jpg”, by default this field will display “kitten”. The text entered here will show in the code pulling the image, but it will also display when a user hovers over the image, usually in a small yellow box.

While the screenshot NK posted doesn’t include anything about the image file name, I’m going to bring it up anyway. The image file name (i.e. “kitten.jpg”) is one of the ways search engines determine what is going on in an image. If what is going on in the image relates to page’s content, the search engines will index the page more accurately … essentially giving your keyword strategy additional “umpf”. To put it another way: No one is searching for IMG098776. But people are searching for kittens.

This is the Title.

2. Caption

The WordPress caption behaves like you might expect a caption to behave: It is text that provides detail and context to the viewer about the image, and is often displayed beneath the image. How (or if) the caption displays is determined by your WordPress theme. As far as SEO goes, if you’ve got your keywords in the caption, it counts as having them as part of the main text of the page.

This is a caption about a cat.
This is a caption about a cat.

3. Alt text

Alt text stands for “alternative text”. It is not normally displayed on screen, but it will display for viewers who have images turned off or who are using screen readers for accessibility.

Alt text is also the most significant setting in an SEO sense. So significant, in fact, that Google’s go-to SEO explainer Matt Cutts has a little video about it:

What he says, essentially, is that the alt text tells Google what the image is about, even more so than the image file name.

What that means, essentially, is that if you do nothing else, you should fill out this field at every possible opportunity, briefly describing the image and incorporating your keyword strategy .

Screen Shot 2013-11-13 at 12.53.53 AM

4. Description

The description can also be important, but please note: this is not the same thing as a meta-description, which shows up on search engines. This field is primary related to WordPress and how the image shows up on your site.

Although the description can be used for display by your theme, it is not common. Primarily the description appears as the main text on the image’s attachment page, which are automatically created for each image you upload to WordPress. Attachment pages have addresses like:

http://sereedmedia.com/?attachment_id=563#main

and, depending on your theme, display things like the image, its title, its description, its size, its upload date. etc.

Screen Shot 2013-11-12 at 11.49.17 PM

That means that not only will the information you enter for the image be helpful in optimizing the post or page you’re using it in, but it can serve to optimize the attachment page as well. And since these pages are auto-generated, they double your SEO-efforts with no extra work!

5. Alignment

This one is pretty self-explanatory, and most folks have no trouble understanding it. It’s usually pretty straightforward:

pawAligned left means the image will be flush to the left side and text will wrap around to the right.

 

paw

Aligned center means an image will appear in the center, with no text on either side.

Aligned right means the image will appear flush to the right side and text will appear on the left (depending on how the text is aligned). paw

 

pawNone means the alignment will default to the most basic setting, usually aligned left with the text aligned to the bottom edge of the image.

The only time this can get tricky is if a theme’s settings override the settings specified here. Then you can right-align and left-align all you want, but the image will stay aligned where the theme is telling it to, until you update the code, override the override, or get a new theme. Things like the amount of spacing between the the text and the image is also determined by your theme.

6. Link To

This field allows you to specify where, or if, the image should serve as a link.

Media File: links to the image itself. By default this will take the viewer to a new page that has only the image on it. Sometimes this option is used to display the image in a lightbox.

This is a caption about a cat.
Links to Media File

Screen Shot 2013-11-13 at 12.27.07 AM

Attachment Page: Links to the image’s attachment page (as discussed in Description, above)

This is the Title.
Links to Attachment Page

Custom URL: Linking to a custom URL allows you to use the link to direct traffic to a specific page, post, or external link.

This is the Title.
Links to a Custom URL

None: No link, just an image that won’t click. Good for logos, icons, etc.

This is the Title.
Links to None

 7. File Size

Every time you upload an image to WordPress it automatically uploads up to four versions of the image. A thumbnail, a medium size, a large size, and the original, full size. The thumbnail, medium and large sizes are set in the Settings>Media screen.

Screen Shot 2013-11-13 at 12.42.59 AM

WordPress likes to keep things pretty, so if your original image size is smaller than any of the size iterations, WordPress won’t stretch it to make the bigger sizes. Also the settings are not dynamic, meaning if you edit the size settings, WordPress will use those dimensions for all new images added, but it won’t go back and re-size your existing images (you can use a plugin to do that).

The image size you should use in a page or post will depend on your individual settings and the needs of that post. I tend to use the medium size the most, but as long as your image sizes are consistent, you can use whatever suits you best!

This is the Title.
Thumbnail
This is the Title.
Medium
This is the Title.
Large

 

And that’s it! A brief tour of the WordPress image settings, a cute kitten and no waiting til April.


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10 responses to “A breakdown of the WordPress image settings”

  1. […] breakdown of the WordPress image settings http://wp.me/p3bxNm-8Rhttp://sereedmedia.com/wordpress-media-image-settings/ From the article: Recently, I posted a query about session topics to a group of attendees of an […]

  2. Charlie Avatar

    Great tips! People often over look the importance of the media fields in optimization and development. But I don’t need to tell you that ;). No…really I don’t!

  3. Oscar Gonzalez Avatar

    Excellent write-up! This should help people that are new to WordPress wrap their head around these settings. They can be intimidating!

  4. Patrick Rauland Avatar

    Hey Se!

    This is a great article. Sums everything very nicely. 🙂

  5. Junaid Rehman Avatar

    Nice and very informative article. Thanks.

  6. Lisa Avatar
    Lisa

    I am working on a headshot gallery of teammembers. Their individual headshots in the gallery link to the media attachment pages, which is what I want.
    The description text, however, doesn’t wrap around the image on the media attachment page. Is there a code that I could insert somewhere that would make this happen?

  7. JS Morisset Avatar
    JS Morisset

    I shared your article with my Facebook/Twitter/G+ followers, but I noticed G+ didn’t pickup an image or description. You may want to look at the NGFB or WPSSO plugins to help with that. 😉

    js.

  8. Peter Armenti Avatar
    Peter Armenti

    my question is.. which attachment setting is best for the seo/indexing of the images? If I want an image to get indexed and when/if it does link to the page that the image was displayed on.. which setting is best? Should I set it to media file? or none?

    1. srm_admin Avatar
      srm_admin

      The attachment page will be created by default whether or not you link to it. If you want that attachment page to be indexed well, use the Description field. This will show on the attachment page (depending on theme settings), and can further enhance the image’s/attachment page’s indexing capability.

      The most important field for SEO, and indexing the image itself, is the Alt field. It is best to always fill this out, with either a simple description of the image, or with more targeting content. This is appended to the metadata in the image, which will follow the image wherever is goes on your site, so the Alt field content should match the targeting goals of the display page.

      Note: You should not target the attachment page and the image (i.e. the Description and Alt fields, respectively) to the same keywords, as this will result in the image display page competing with the attachment page.

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