Living Open Source

If you intend to tell a story, pictures and images are essential. If you are announcing an upcoming event, use a picture from the last event. If you are sharing news, a single photo helps tell the story. Just one simple thumbnail in each post works well, like at White Oak. And then of course there is the obligatory recent shots in the sidebar that every blog seems to have. There are a number of options for managing and displaying images with WordPress.

Using the built-in browser

The built-in browser is a good starting point, which allows you to quickly upload and insert images into your posts. WordPress stores these and can organise them into folders by date.

As you build up a larger collection of images or if photos become a large part of your site, then you’ll want to use a better tool to manage the images. You have have two choices. Either use one of the hosted applications like Flickr or install and host your own image gallery.

Using Flickr with WordPress

There are Flickr look-a-likes, but why bother? Flickr is really easy to use and there are a growing number of WordPress plugins that allow you to integrate your Flickr albums into your site.

If you just need your recent photos in the sidebar, use FlickrRSS. To integrate you entire Flickr collections into your site FAlbum and Flickr Photo Album work well. The Flickr Photo Album also adds extra tabs to the default WordPress image browser, which means you can insert images into posts with ease.

Using Plogger with WordPress

I use Plogger on my blog with PloggerPress, my own WordPress plugin. The advantage of this is that you are in complete control of your images. Though you will need to install Plogger on your host.

You can read why I opted for Plogger over the hundred other alternatives here.