Images are one of the most important and crucial part of a website, helping to make the site more interactive and engaging for users. And so, as a WordPress user, you’ll likely need to access images stored as a part of media files, from the Media Library. What’s more? The Media Library was created to help users upload their media files in their WordPress website admin panel without any hassle. However, there’s one problem with the Media Library: it’s not organized and look too messy.
Wondering why?
Well, WordPress CMS doesn’t provide support to create media categories for files, as well as, links. Not being able to create such categories, you’ll have to select the desired image from the long list of images available in the Media Library (as you can see in the image below):
It’s pretty obvious, searching the image that you want from the list can be time-consuming. In essence, the WordPress Media Library comprises of unorganized image files, which makes finding the needed image a difficult task.
This post is intended to help you learn about some basic steps following which will help you make your WordPress website Media Library a lot more systematize.
Step 1 – Manage Your Media Files
As you know, WordPress comes loaded with plenty of useful plugins that can be used to embed additional features in your site, based on your specific needs. And so, the first thing that you can do to make your media files organized is to make use of an appropriate plugin. Enhanced Media Library is one such great plugin that helps in managing the media library, by letting you create multiple media taxonomies, namely: categories and tags. And so, you can place your files in their specific categories which make searching for the required media file(s) a hassle-free task.
Furthermore, the plugin also provides better control over how you choose to manage your media categories and tags, as it also enables you to edit and delete the media taxonomies you’ve created.
Step 2 – Make the Media Library Structure Systematized Using Categories
It’s a known fact that categories play a vital part in keeping the things organized. And so, when searching for some specific media file from a WordPress install devoid of media categories (especially the ones uploaded months/years ago) can be overwhelming and a strenuous task. Therefore, you should focus on finding ways that can help in creating categories for your image files. Thankfully, there is an excellent plugin that can help in achieving such an objective with ease.
The Media Library Categories plugin help make use of categories in the media library of a WordPress install. Once the plugin gets activated, you can view all of the categories as part of a drop-down menu added to the media library. You can easily locate the exact media file you need, simply by using the “category name” as your search filter. What’s best about this plugin, is that it gives the ability to change the category containing many different items forthwith.
Step 3 – Make Your Media Library Cluttered By Creating Sub-folders
Another viable way to organize and arrange your media files is to move them into sub-folders. This is exactly what the Media File Manager Advanced is capable of doing. This plugin helps in creating sub-directories and move all the media items into those directories. The best part is that you don’t have to waste your time in naming your newly created folders, as the Media File Manager modifies the name, as well as, URLs in the database.
In addition, the plugin also helps add an alternative file-selector in the WordPress install post editing or page editing screen, so as to help you filter the media files you need from the sub-folders with ease.
Step 4 – Use Thumbnails To Improve Search Results
As of now, you’ll come to know the level of difficulty associated with finding the exact image you want from the unorganized WordPress Media Library. Apart from the aforesaid steps, there is one other way to make searching for the right images an easy task. You can add thumbnails to the uploaded images. Via the Post Thumbnail Extras plugin.
This plugin allows adding thumbnails by embedding a shortcode. But, if you specialize in writing code, you can choose to use hooks offered by Post Thumbnail Extras plugin. These hooks will help you create your own custom shortcodes to embed thumbnails in your website media library.
Step 5 – Follow Approach That Helps to Import Files Into the Media Library
Besides being criticized for its messy look, the WordPress Media Library proves a headache for users who’re in constant need of importing media files into the media library. Simply put, adding several media files at once in the media library can be a daunting task, and you won’t probably find an easy way to fulfill such need. Besides this, carrying out bulk changes simultaneously can make your head spin. But, you can make such tasks easier with the help of the Upload Media by Zip plugin.
It enables to import all the files into the media library in the form of a zip file.
This plugin makes WordPress unzip the folder, and attach the extracted items to the page/post of your website.
Note: This plugin hasn’t been updated since two years, and so, make sure to backup your files and all the data on your website before the plugin installation.
Summing Up!
A lot of WordPress users complaint about the difficulty they face in finding image files because of the unorganized Media Library. However, there are amazing plugins out there that can help you in making the WordPress Media Library organized and present the media files stored in the library in a systematized manner. You can use the plugin to create categories within the media library, or create sub-directories containing your image files and so on.
Here’s hoping that this post will give you a fair idea of the ways that will make the process of making the Media Library uncluttered in a WordPress install.
