Version Wordpress 2.9 now has a built-in image editor, which allows you to do stuff with your uploaded images and includes what you would expect from basic image editing fuctionality, including crop, edit, rotate and flip, as well as scale your images or photos to show them off in exactly the way you want. Not rocket science, but a needed addition!
Wordpress say that:
“This is the first wave of our many planned media handling improvements!”
This is great as this is one part of this blogging software that has needed some improvement for some time now.
Being able to manipulate images after loading them up into the media gallery, instead of before in other photo or image editing software, is a great bonus and should be a real time saver.
At Last Real Wordpress Image Editing!
This cool new functionality is going to be very useful! You can add images using the post / page editor or directly using the Media option in the menu options on the left of your Wordpress admin dashboard. Under Media you will find two more options: Library and Add New.
The first will take you to the Wordpress media library for your site, where you will see all the images, photos and other media you have already loaded listed for you. Here you can pick an image to edit or work on. The second will allow you to add new images now to the library.
If you are new to adding images up to your Wordrpess site or just not to sure what it’s all about then I suggest you first read this other post, which covers the basics of adding images and how that works with the Media Library:
How To Insert Photos Or Images Into Wordpress Posts And Pages.
This will provide you with all the information you need to get started and show you how to add images to your image library and to posts or pages. Rememer as just mentioned above that you can easily add images directly from your computer desktop into post and pages from the post editor – you don’t have to add them to the library first.
Note: Adding images to posts and pages will also automatically put your images into the media library during the upload process from your computer!
Editing, Cropping, Scaling, Rotating and Flipping Images and Photos in Wordpress
For this example we will take an image that is already in the media library and see what we can do with it in the new Wordpress image editing functionality…
So first click on the MEDIA option in your Wordpres admin dashboard menu and then click on LIBRARY.
You will then be presented with a display of the list of all your previously uploaded images or digital photos with a smal thumbnail shown against eash one so you can easily identify them, even if you gave them weird names.
You will also see the file name, the author, the post or page where it is used and the date it was loaded listed against each image.
Just scroll up and down until you find the photograph or digital images that you want to edit. When you find the one you arelooking for just click on the image thumbnail or on the edit option which appears when your cursor is on the line of the image to be edited. For this example I will use the Canada image below…
You will then see the EDIT MEDIA window displayed for the image you have just selected:
Now click on the EDIT IMAGE button so you can start your image editting session. This will display the IMAGE EDITOR in Wordpress:
Simple Image Editing in Wordpress
By using the buttons at the top of the image editor you can do some quick and simple things to you images or photos.
1. Rotate your image counter-clockwise
2. Rotate your image clock-wise
3. Flip your image vertically
4. Flip your image horizonatlly
5. Undo the last action
6. Redo the last action
How To Scale Images in Wordpress
This now really easy! Previously you were initially restricted to the different sized images created when Wordpress uploads your image and these can be set in the Settings area of the dashboard and by then clicking on Media. This gave you 4 exact size of image you can specifiy for any image you upload.
You can then also change the size of an image by a percentage when it has already been embedded into a post or page (using the old edit image functionality, which is still there), but this was never an exact science although very useful.
However, now you can really scale images in Wordpress to whatever size you want!
For scaling images just click on the Scale Image link at the top right and this will open up this window with your current image size in pixels.
Just change the values to what you want but if you go crazy you can fuzz up your image if you make it bigger it will look really bad! This is proportional scalling so the apsect ratio always stays the same and the image cannot become distorted (if you change one dimension the other will be changed for you automatically!).
Click on the SCALE button to complte your changes. Note that after you scale your image you still get the option to Restore Original Image if you need it!
Cropping an Image or Digital Photo in Wordpress
Once again this has now become really easy to do, once you know how.
To start just Left Click your mouse with the cursor positioned over the top left corner of the area you want to crop from your photo or image and then drag your cursor (a rectange box will appear to show you the area you will be cropping!) until you position it at the opposite point of the area to be cropped. Then just release your mouse. There in the rectangular box is what will be cropped form the image.
Just repreat the process if you don’t quite get it right or by using your mouse and the cursor to drag the corners or edges by just clicking on one of the little squares and holding the click to drag the edge or corner to where you want. This is so easy!
Note that the size of your selection to be cropped is displayed under Image Crop to the right.
You can also change the size of the box displayed by just entering different dimension numbers in to the Selection values on the right. You can also just drag the box around the image with your mouse!
When you are done with the selection process just click on the CROP Button in the top left to create your new image from the cropped area on the original.
Then if you are happy with your cropping just click on the SAVE button to permanently keep it.
Note that if you then go and edit the image again you will still be able to restore it to the original, if you accidently saved a bad cropping. That’s cool!
What Next?
Well now just go play and enjoy! This is such a BIG improvment, so thanks Wordpress and we all look forward to some even bigger media handling improvements in the very near future. You did promise!
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Hi,
I am very new at this and was hoping you could help me with a problem I’m having.
On the Truly Blessed I and II pages, I would like to put a picture of that house in the top left corner with the wording starting on the right side of the picture.
I have already put all the photo’s of each house on it’s page.
Thank you,
Sissy Norman
Just checkout this post:
How To Insert Photos Or Images Into Wordpress Posts And Pages
It tells you all you need to know about adding images to pages and posts in Wordpress.