Your media library

Media is every picture the blog holds, whether you uploaded it there or dropped it into a post.

What happens to an upload

A picture is not stored the way you sent it.

It is re-encoded to modern formats and kept alongside the original, so a browser that can take a smaller file gets one and an old browser still gets something it understands.

It is resized into a set of widths, and posts are served a list of them so a phone downloads a phone-sized picture rather than your 4000 pixel original.

Its dimensions are recorded, and the page reserves that space before the picture arrives. This is why a post on this blog does not jump around while it loads.

The original is never thrown away. If a better encoder or a new format arrives, everything you have ever uploaded can be produced again from it.

Descriptions

Three fields, and they are not the same thing.

Alt text is for somebody who cannot see the picture. One sentence saying what it shows, with no "image of" at the front. It is also the only thing a search engine can read in a picture, so it is the field with two reasons to exist.

Caption is shown under the picture, if the design is set to show captions. It is for the reader who can see it.

Note is for you. It is not published anywhere. Use it for where a photograph came from or what licence it is under.

The library shows how many pictures still have no alt text, and can filter down to exactly those, which makes it a ten minute job rather than a hunt. When there are none left it says so.

The allowance

Pictures count against a storage allowance for the blog. The library shows a bar once you are three quarters of the way through it, and the workspace gets a notice at the same point, because running out mid-upload on a Friday afternoon is the wrong way to find out.

Two things help more than deleting:

Uploading the picture you actually need rather than the camera's original. The pipeline will resize, but it stores what you gave it as the original.

Reusing what is already there. A picture used in six posts is stored once.

Deleting

Deleting frees the space and cannot be undone: the original and every derived size go.

Before you do it, the library tells you where the picture is used. A picture used as a cover is worth checking, because a post whose cover has gone falls back to no cover rather than to a broken image, and that changes how it looks on the front page and in a shared link.

Where pictures come from

An upload, either on this screen or from inside a post.

An import. Bringing a blog across pulls the pictures too, rewrites the posts to point at the copies, and keeps the originals. See bringing a blog across.

The content calendar. An article the calendar publishes here arrives with its cover, and the cover lands in the library like anything else.