Do you want to quickly edit images for your blog posts or galleries? A lot of people, especially beginners, don’t know that WordPress actually comes with a basic image editor with features like crop, scale, rotate, and flip. So, focusing the beginners and all who wants to know how to easily edit images in WordPress, here is a short tutorial on how you can do so.
But before we get into the tutorial, let’s learn why you need to edit images in WordPress.
Why Do You need To Edit Images in WordPress?
You might be wondering why you would want to edit images in WordPress when there are so many sophisticated image processing software and plugins that facilitate complex image editing. Well, the main reason is that you may not always have access to a photo editing software or you might not always need a complex software to edit your images quickly. In those cases, WordPress image editor can be a life saver.
Basic image processing activities like cropping an image to required size, rotating an image and resizing can be done using the WordPress image editor.
Now, let’s take a look at how to easily edit images in WordPress with WordPress image editor.
Editing Images in WordPress
The first thing you need to do is upload your image in WordPress. You can either drag and drop the image on the visual editor or simply go to Media > Add New from your WordPress dashboard.
Once the file is uploaded successfully, the file name and its thumbnail are displayed on the screen. You will find an Edit link at the bottom of the page. Click to open the editor.
Then, click on the Edit Image button just below the image to enter the image editor zone.
Once you are inside the image editor, you will see the image and its details. The title of the image on top and it can be changed. The permalink for the image is given below that. The image processing tools are lined up below that followed by the image itself. The two buttons—Save and Cancel are placed underneath so as to save and cancel the changes made.
Just above the image, you will see the Crop, Flip, Rotate, Undo and Redo buttons.
Crop: If you are willing to crop your image, just click anywhere on the image and drag the mouse to make a selection. On doing this, the Image Crop Meta box will show the dimensions (width x height) of the selection area. You can change these to adjust the size. Once the selection is made, the crop button above the image is enabled and you can click on it to crop the image to selection.
Flip: You can use this flip button to create a mirror image of the original image. You can flip the image either vertically or horizontally. Note that either way, the dimension remain the same.
Rotate: You can rotate your image clockwise or anticlockwise. Though the rotation operation should interchange the width and height, the dimensions are not updated or displayed till the changes have been saved.
Undo and Redo: At some point of editing, if you want to undo one or more edits, hit the undo button to get the work done. Remember, if you hit the save button, the undo button gets disabled. And whenever an undo is made, the Redo button gets enabled.
After the required edits are made, click on the Save button to save the changes.
On the right side of your screen, you will be able to see the Scale or Resize option, from here you can resize your image to make it fit into the layout defined by the theme. Once you hit the save button, you will notice that the scaling box displays the new dimensions. Usually, scaling down or resizing to a smaller size is preferred to resizing to a bigger size (scaling up). This is because scaling up causes a loss in image quality.
If you don’t like the new image that you just resized or edited, you can always hit the Restore button to go back to the original image.
The caption for the image, the alternate text (text that appears if the image cannot be displayed on the page) and the description follow at last. The last three details can be usually filled in the Insert Media screen itself, but in case you miss it there, you can always edit them here.
Apart from all the details above, you will see a meta box at the right corner of the screen, showing the details of the image file. The date and time of upload of the file, the URl of the image file which shows the path and filename with extension (format) of the file, the file name, the type of the file, the size of the file and its dimensions in the pixel are displayed. These are for the users’ reference and cannot be changed directly here. When the image is edited, these details change accordingly.
Finally, click on the Update to update the media image with all the changes.
We hope this article helped you learn how to easily edit images in WordPress. With the above basic utilities, you can do simple and quick edits on an image file before inserting it into a post or page.
If you have anything to add or share, please let us know through the comments section. We’d love to hear from you.
Source: WP Dean, Envira Gallery