Resize and Crop Images in WordPress

Sometimes you will need to resize or crop images for a specific purpose. For example:

  • reduce the size of a large image taken with a digital camera so it doesn’t slow down your website
  • reduce the width of your image so it fits neatly into a particular section of your website
  • crop out a specific section of an image to use on your website.

The term resizing can refer to two different aspects of your images:

  • image dimensions: the height and width of your image (in pixels, px)
  • image file size: the number of bytes used to store the image (in kilobytes, Kb)

If you reduce the dimensions of an image, you will also reduce the image file size. But you can also leave the image dimensions the same, and reduce the image file size by reducing the image quality. You can often reduce the image quality quite a lot and not be able to pick up any change in the image with the naked eye.

You can resize and crop images before uploading them to your website using a variety of Windows/Mac image editing tools.

Or you can use the built in image editor in WordPress to resize and crop images.

Getting to the Image Editor

1. Upload your images to WordPress so you can view them in your Media Library (go to Dashboard, Media Library).

There are two ways you can do this:

  • use Dashboard, Media Library, Add New
  • use Dashboard, Pages, Edit Page and from the page editor click the Add an Image icon

2. Once your images are uploaded, go to Dashboard, Media Library and view all your images. Note: there is a Screen Options tab at the top right of most WordPress dashboard pages that lets you set how many items are displayed per page – increasing the number from the default of 20 to around 200 means you’ll see more images without paging.

3. Click on the name of the file you want to edit, and then press the Edit Image button to open the Image Editor.

Using the Image Editor

There are 3 video walk throughs for the WordPress image editor available from WordPress dashboard of OM4 sites. Go to Dashboard, Manual, User Manual, Video Manuals and view the 3 related videos:
Edit Images Videos

There is a detailed walk through article available from WordPress.com: WordPress.com Image Editing

Preparing Images for Galleries

If you are a photographer and need to prepare a lot of images for galleries, you should prepare your images externally before uploading.

If you only need to manage a few galleries, you can:

  • Use the Dashboard, Pages, Edit Page and then the Add an Image button to upload your gallery images and insert your gallery shortcode
  • Use Dashboard, Media Library to go back and edit the gallery images to resize them (for example, to use the Scale function to scale them to a maximum of 1,200px wide)