Media
Photos, videos, documents and more can all be added to WP sites. There are two main ways to do it which depend more on whether you know what media you need to use in advanced or you decide on the media to use on the fly as you’re editing a post/page.
If you know in advanced the best thing to do is to select the Media tab via the Dashboard. This opens the Media Library page where you can view all the media that has been previously uploaded and sort it by type of media or date of upload.
Adding new media via Media Library page, by clicking the ‘Add New’ button, expands the page with a place were files can be dragged and dropped or searched for on the device. Media added this way will only add it to the Library rather than insert it into a page/post making it the best method for uploading multiple files and types of media at once.
The other option is, while editing a page/post there is a ‘Add Media’ button at the top left of the editor.
This opens a new window within the page that links to the Media Library. Through this media can be selected from the Library or new media can be dragged and dropped or searched for on the device. Media selected through this method will be inserted into the page/post exactly where the cursor is.
There are some useful features in this window. On the right hand side details such as file size and pixel amount and ratio are displayed. This is also where Alt Text, titles, captions and descriptions can be added and page position and size can be adjusted.
Background Images
This theme can have a background image so I choose one that I took at a Olafur Eliasson exhibition at the Tate Modern. They can be set by hitting the ‘Customise’ tab from your site and selecting ‘Background Image’
.GIF
Animated .gif images can be added to a WP site the same as any normal image, via the media uploader. The key difference is that when inserted into a page they only animate if inserted as ‘full size’. This is because when a image or .gif is uploaded to WP it creates three different sized versions of the image: ‘thumbnail, medium, and large’. As well as keeping the original image in full size.
WP ends up saving only the first frame of a .gif when creating the different image sizes. This is why if you add any of those image sizes into a page they will be static images with no animation.
There are plugins available that allow searching and inserting .gif(s) directly via the site admin page – https://wordpress.org/plugins/giphypress/
