From the course: WordPress.com Essential Training

Media Settings - WordPress Tutorial

From the course: WordPress.com Essential Training

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Media Settings

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- [Instructor] Earlier, when we were going through Site Settings, we skipped this Media option. Now that we're going to talk about working with images, I'd like to walk you through it. So if we click on Media, the first thing we see here are default dimensions for images when adding them to the Media library. So let's say that you upload an image to the Media library, which I'll show you how to do soon, WordPress behind the scenes is generating several versions of that image at various sizes. And those are the sizes that you see here. Thumbnail, Medium size, and Large. These dimensions are set in pixels that you can customize here if you want. Going back to our earlier conversation about site performance, image size plays a significant role in how quickly your page loads. Whenever you drop an image into a poster page, you have the option to select which of these sizes you'll use. Generally speaking, you want to pick the smallest size that still gets the job done. For instance, if a medium sized photo will do, use that over the large image, as that helps cut down on overall page size. Of course, do whatever looks best for the look that you're trying to achieve. Some themes will also introduce their own image sizes based on that theme's design. My recommendation is to leave these settings at their default unless you just particularly want another dimension to use. The next setting we have is for the Image Gallery Carousel. There are two blocks, the Gallery block and the Post Carousel block. And if you use those, that's where these settings come into effect. I suggest just leaving the default settings when you get started and then come back and play around with these options when you're ready to use one of those blocks in your content, then you can experiment. Lastly, we have this Video player settings, and the only one currently available is Podcasting. Earlier, when we looked at our Writing Settings, we had the opportunity to set up Podcasting. We didn't do that, but if we go back over here to Media, what we're seeing here is simply a way to apply a default host category to use for a podcast feed. And you might recognize these from categories we added earlier. So these are your Media Settings. If you end up seeing something different on your screen than what I have or if you have additional questions, be sure to check out the wordpress.com support article on Media Settings.

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