Hello, my name is Chrissy Ray and in these lessons you will learn how to manage the Media Library in WordPress, how to edit images that you've uploaded and also how to optimize images that you'll put on your WordPress website. So first up, let's take a look at the Media Library. You can get to that by going into the WordPress dashboard and then going to the media menu. Inside of the Media Library you'll see that there are two views. Right now I'm in list view and you can switch over to this grid view, so use the one that works best for you. I personally prefer the list view. The list view looks very similar to the post or pages screen where you can see all of the content for that particular type. And in this case, it's gonna be all of the media that you've uploaded. Media can include anything like images, PDFs MP3 files, wav files, video files or any zip files that you might have uploaded to your WordPress website. So there are a lot of different types of files that can be in your Media Library. Right now I've got three images and I will show you in just a minute how you can add other types of media to this library. But I do wanna show you in the list view here that you've got the file names, the author, you've got which page or post the media has been attached to, so which one it's been embedded in. And then you can also see when it was uploaded. Another thing I wanna point out is that I have an Imagify column here and that's because I've got an optimization plugin installed called Imagify, and that allows me to optimize any images that I've uploaded. One more thing I wanna point out here is that you can filter the media. So I can filter by the types of media and this will expand if I add additional types. And then also the dates. So it'll give me the month and the year that it's been uploaded, and I can see all of the images that have been uploaded for a specific month and year. And then this filter here is from Imagify. So it lets me see which images have been optimized which have not been optimized. And you can see I can filter all of those. Now if you wanted to upload images to your Media Library if you wanted to upload any media to your Media Library you can do it when you embed the object or the media into a poster, a page, or you can go into the Media Library and then click on Add New. And that's going to give you a uploader. And you can just select your files. And you can see right here I've got a media folder that's got a bunch of different files in it. So I'm gonna upload a few different files. So if I go into my audio folder, you can see I've got a wav file and an MP3 file. I'm just going to shift click to select both of those. Or you can control click, or if you're on a Mac command, click to select multiple. And then I'm going to click on the open button and you'll see that uploads both of those media files. It puts a little musical note there to show me that those are audio files. Once I upload it you can see I can copy the URL to the clipboard. So if I wanted to go straight to that media file, I could. You also have the option to edit it. That doesn't mean you can actually edit the audio. So you can see here, if I click on edit that's gonna take me to a screen where I can then listen to the audio I can add a caption to it, I can give it a description and then I can add any metadata. If that information was in the file when I uploaded it, it would automatically go into those settings. You also get some more information about the file so you can see what file type it is, how large it is and some other information about it. I'm gonna add some more media. So I wanna click on Add New again at the top. And again, I'm going to select my files. And this time I'm going to upload some PDFs or actually one PDF. So I'll upload this PDF file and we'll see after that's been uploaded. If I click on edit, you can see it just gives me the option to set a caption and a description. Doesn't really give me anything else for that one. I'll add some new, I'm going to add, this time I'm gonna add some video. So I'm gonna add a MP4 file. Oh, it's too big. If that ever happens, you can see my maximum upload file size is 128 megabytes. That is something that you can change on your server so you might need to check with your post team provider to fix that if you need to upload a larger size. So I won't be able to upload that particular file to my website. I'm gonna click on select files, and we're gonna go back to media and I'm gonna upload a bunch of images. So again, I can shift click to select all of those and we'll click on open. And that's going to upload all of these images. Now, because I have Imagify, it's also as I upload them, it's gonna optimize them. So it just automatically does that. That's one of the nice things about that plugin. But you can see as it uploads it, again, I can copy the URL to the clipboard and I can also click on edit. Now I'm gonna let this continue to upload. It may take a few minutes to upload all of them. There are quite a few files and I'm going to open the Media Library in a new tab. So I'll go over here to my menu. I'm going to right click or control click on the library menu and choose Open link in new tab. So we'll take a look at the Media Library now and you can see there's a lot more in it. So I've got my images, I've got my PDF I've got my wav files and my MP3 file. I don't have the video file 'cause I wasn't able to upload that. It was too big. And my maximum upload size is 128 megabytes. Now, once I've got a lot of files in here, I just wanna point out that you can do some bulk actions to the files. So if I, for example, I wanted to do something to these three files, I could just check those three off and then go to Bulk Actions and I can delete permanently. The optimized setting and the Restore original are also Imagify options. So I wouldn't be able to do that unless I installed Imagify. But you can see I have the option to delete it permanently. And notice here, if I move my mouse over this item I can delete it permanently. Notice that there is not an option to put it into the trash. So with pages and posts, you can put those into the trash. You can't do that with media files. That's because media files are actual files. When you delete or trash a poster or a page what it's doing is it's setting the poster page in the database to be marked as in the trash. It doesn't actually delete it permanently until you go in and empty the trash and then it deletes that row or row in the database. In the case of media files, when you delete it you are actually deleting the file. It doesn't just put it into a quarantine or something like that. It deletes the file from the server. So when it's gone, it's gone. So be really careful when you do that. Now another thing you can do from here is you can view the media file. So I'm gonna click on view there and that's just gonna bring the media file up. If I did that for PDF, you can see that's going to open the PDF file. And same thing with the MP3 or the wav file. It'll just open that file up. Now one last thing that we've got here is that you can edit different things. So from this screen we've already seen what happens if you edit the PDF file or the audio file. And you can see here, if you click on edit for the image file, it takes you into this editor which gives you a few additional things like the alternative text, the caption, and the description. Just remember when you upload images after you upload them I would recommend before you start adding these images to your post or your pages that you go in and you add this alternative text to all of your images. That way when you add the image to a post or page the alternative text will already be there so you don't have to add it while you're adding the image to the post or the page. So there is a lot more to media. This is just sort of the beginning of it but make sure you look around, poke around in the Media Library and get some practice with it. Thanks for watching. Stay tuned for the next lesson where I will show you how to edit an image that you've already uploaded to WordPress.
