Managing WordPress Media Files

Images and other media such as gallery of images, videos, pdfs, soundfiles etc  have been secondary citizens when working with the WordPress Media Library. WordPress has added support for video, pdf, Microsoft Windows files, soundfiles  etc over the past 10 years. Users can now edit Media Library  images – cropping them and downsizing them. And for a awhile users had  Adobe Aviary for making broad color and effects styling changes to images; but this is no longer supported. Images can be compressed and displayed in lightbox style if you have the right plugins.  Media Library Galleries now support masonry layout – no, that requires the free Justified Gallery plugin.

As you can see on competitive websites, media are very important to WordPress success. Media are being used extensively in full page-width sliders and videos, landing page product galleries, on media intensive websites. But that has created a two-fold backend logjam  with media. First, media are now responsible for 65% of page load time. Second the number of images and media file to manage has increased from dozens to hundreds if not thousands.

This web developer has switched on photo intensive websites from media Library to  using Nextgen Gallery because  it is easier to create multiple galleries whose contents can be tagged, moved and displayed in so many ways  However, Nextgen Gallery is primarily a photo gallery tool. Other media such as videos, audios. and other media filetypes are lightly served. But perhaps, the most important need for both media Library and Nextgen is for media manipulation like on your desktop – media stored in  subfolders and movement of media between folders with drag and drop simplicity. 

And as if responding to the WordPress motto, over the past 3 years  a number of  software shops have delivered “there is a plugin for that” with Drag and Drop add-ons to the Media Library..  Colorlib has a great review of some of the leading candidates of Media Library Drag and Drop Management addons. Notice that these are ad-on plugins that work with the current Media Library, all the popular themes and pagebuilder plugins. Also, our tests of popular gallery and slider plugins like FooGallery and Smart Slider 3 showed the add-ons worked well. And