How to Add a Picture to a Blog Post
by Mike Mintz

This post will teach you a very basic function: how to add a picture to a blog post.  While some find this a simple task, many clients have trouble with this when they start blogging.  The following sections will tell you all you need to know to post great looking images into your blog and tell a visual story that makes readers appreciate your work even more.

Add Blog Pictures in 3-Steps

This post focuses on WordPress since it is my favorite blogging platform.  The functions are similar in most tools, but the images for this post will be from WordPress tools only.  Once you have an image (we’ll discuss below how to find them) follow these simple steps to put it in your post.  So put your cursor where you want to insert the picture and do the following:

  1. Upload/Insert – click on the “picture icon” above the tool bar, where it says “Upload/Insert.”
  2. Add From – in the next screen you get 3 choices of where to add your image from:
    • Your Computer – this is a picture from your hard drive (a file you’ve saved from somewhere)
    • URL – this is a picture from the Internet that still resides on someone else’s site.
      • TIP: the web address you paste into the insert window must have an image file extension, i.e. where the .com usually goes in a regular web address, it should say something like .jpg or .png or .tif – these are the three most common.  Check out this full list of file extensions (I’ve never even seen most of these!).
    • Media Library – this is like a folder that exists on your WordPress blog that allows you to upload images, music, video, and other files for insertion or attachment to posts.
  3. Customize and Insert – from this screen (see shot below) you can customize certain features of your picture:
    • Size – choose from thumbnail, medium, full size
    • Placement – left, center, right, or none
    • Link – add a hyperlink to have someone taken to a new site when they click on the image

Screen Shot of Image Uploader

Advance Picture Tools

After you’ve inserted a picture (like the one above) you can click on it to bring up two icons:

  1. Picture Editing (looks like a little picture)
  2. Delete (looks like the Ghostbusters sign without the ghost in it)

Click on the picture editing and you’ll be given standard and advance editing tools.  The standard tools look like what you saw in the picture uploader.  The advance tools are a bit meatier.  They let you do things like:

  1. Change exact dimensions/proportions
  2. Add a border, and
  3. Control the amount of white space between the picture and text of your blog (this is very important as some WordPress templates and designs squish text against images – yuck!)

Finding Great Blog Images

There are so many places to find great blog images and I’m going to name a few.  But first, a caveat about taking images from the Internet.  What I’m about to say is not legal advice (even though I am a lawyer), and you should proceed at your own risk with the following suggestions.  Here are my trusted methods for obtaining images for my blog posts:

  1. Rights Free and Royalty Free Paid Service – a royalty-free paid service like istockphoto.com or shutterstock.com allows you to purchase a subscription to download images from their collections that are rights-free, meaning once you purchase/download them from the service, as long as you adhere to the terms of service of the site (usually something like “don’t use this as a trademark or in an obscene way, etc.”) the picture is yours to use.
  2. Creative Commons and Zemanta – another option is to search Creative Commons, which contains thousands of images in the public domain, meaning they are works on which copyrights have either expired or been given to the public by the artist for free use.  Usually images from these sites are safe to use, but you should be careful to read the fine print before assuming free reign. Zemanta is plug-in for WordPress that does the searching of these sites for you.
  3. Google Images – a quick way to find great images is to just do a Google search.  Many times what you find will be copyrighted so proceed at your own risk.  With that said, many people on the web display images they don’t own on their blogs so you may be able to hide with the pack and get away with it.  In most instances, if there is an issue with you using a picture on a post either the link will be broken (if you displayed using URL) or the blog company will take it down at the direction of the owner.

You could also do what I do a lot and create your own images with screen capture software and an image editor.  Whatever direction you take, adding pictures to your blog should be easy, and I hope this article has been helpful to you.

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Category: Tactics

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