WordPress: The Missing Manual, 3rd Edition

Chapter 7: Adding Pictures, Videos, and More

You spent the preceding chapter filling your posts with headings, lists, and other types of fancy formatting. This is great if you’re mainly concerned with making blocks of text look good. But if you want to stand out in the crowded online world, full of websites jockeying for attention, you need more. You need to add rich media, like pictures, video, and interactive widgets.

WordPress has you covered with a wide variety of blocks that are tailored to different types of content. In this chapter, you’ll learn to use them. You’ll start by adding ordinary pictures, along with a few finer details (like captions, columns, and galleries). Then you’ll learn how to show content from other websites, like YouTube videos, SoundCloud playlists, or even a Kickstarter project. As you’ll see, WordPress makes it easy.

Adding a Basic Picture

On the web, text and pictures are usually stored in separate files, and it’s not much different in the world of WordPress. To put a picture into a WordPress post, you need to upload the picture file to your website. You can do that using the familiar post editor. Here’s how:

1. Go to the post editor.

   It doesn’t matter how you get here. You can create a new post, or you can edit something you wrote previously. Go to the spot in your post where you want to insert your picture.

2. Click the Add Block button and choose Image.

   When you add an Image block, it starts out as an empty placeholder box. There’s nothing in it but ...