WordPress and photos 1: Uploading and file management in WordPress

I have been wanting to bring my photo gallery back online but I really have been struggling with it. WordPress’ uploading system doesn’t facilitate easy and quick uploading of multiple files or folders. You can upload one file at a time through the interface which will be uploaded to the uploads folder in the content folder on your webserver. The file is stored in a subfolder with the name of the current month in a folder with the name of the current year. For example: wp-content/uploads/2007/04/filename.jpg

Uploaded files are managed by date instead of name or content further underlining the chronological descending order built into blogs (and blog software). In the interface you can only upload files when you are writing a post and after uploading the file is linked with this post. If you upload several files, one by one as multiple file uploading is not possible, you can browse through them using the “Browse” tab. If you want to use the file again for a different post you have to browse through all your uploaded files under the “Browse all” tab. The files are sorted in chronological descending order and not by post or filetype making it hard to find the right file. Also all the picture files are displayed as a thumbnail picture (which makes it hard to see the difference if there are two pictures that are quite similar) and the text is displayed by it’s title.

The upload form is separated from the writing form and the interface makes it seem that adding anything besides text is optional. It also indicates that adding more than a few images (or other files) to your blog post or reusing old files is not common. I think this points back to the days when blogs were text only but nowadays we want to add photos, videos, podcasts and more. To make this possible plugins have been developed that allow you to dissolve some of the restrictions of WordPress. Plugins have been developed to make it easier to integrate a photo gallery in WordPress. This series will deal with a few of these galleries and plugins and it will show you how to turn your WordPress blog into a photoblog using Flickr.

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