WordPress “Add an image” image/photo size & resizing

If you’re frequently adding images to your blog posts in WordPress but get tired of constantly messing with the photo size or resizing the photo or image, there’s an easy fix.  This method is only helpful when you want the image to always be the same width as your posts.

If you’re like me I usually start with very large images.  Take for example screen shots. When I take a screen shot, it’s  1280×1024 in size. For those of you with larger monitors and higher resolutions, your screen shots will be even larger. When I go to a WordPress blog post that I’m writing and I want to include a screen shot, the image will be way to large to fit within the width of my post. The maximum width that I can fit in a post is about 500 pixels wide. Anything larger than that and the theme (sidebar) will get all pushed over and wacky looking. Normally I would upload the image and then use the “Add an image” feature to add the photo to the post. Then I would have to alter the photo size by either resizing it manually or use the percentage feature to make the photo/image smaller. In the case of a screen shot, I would have to take the image down to more than 60% of the original size.

You can also click on the “thumbnail, medium or large” options for the image to resize the photo. However, these will not be the exact width of your blog post since each WordPress theme is slightly different. Instead you can edit the settings for the “large” option of resizing a photo. To to this go to Settings > Media in the WordPress admin section.

You’ll see the “Large size” setting above. Change the Max Width to the maximum width of your blog post… in my WordPress theme the max width is 500. I leave the max height set to the screen shot height of 1024.  After you make the change click “Save Changes”.

Now when you add an image the “large” size option will automatically be set to 500 wide (by) whatever the resized height would be. In the example below a 1280×1024 screen shot image is automatically resized to 500×400.

Now I can insert the photo or image and the image will be the perfect width for a blog post. As you see in this post every image above fits within the width of the blog post and is 500 pixels wide.

It’s a nice time saver when you frequently work with very large images and want to size or resize them differently.  And as always, if you would like the image smaller than the width of the blog you still have the option of using the thumbnail, medium or % resizing feature within the photo edit image screen.