Coming up with new ideas as a way of showing images can be a tough job. Let’s face I there are not a lot of things we can do that haven’t been done before in some way. But it is good to be able to decide which of the many ways will suit the theme of the blog we are posting to. So many things on the net become stereotyped in the way we present them that we really need to use both ingenuity and imagination to be able to produce something different. And to be able to produce something both different and unique is an on going goal of mine. Obviously I mean that in a good way. You don’t want to produce something that is unique but such a mess no one wants to look at it.

Some of the plug-ins that are available to use to create images in our blogs are listed below.

WP Get Post Image

This plug-in is a developers plug-in which enables them to incorporate the upload of images via WordPress. It is not meant to be used by the general theme users.

Flickr Gallery

Flickr gallery will show your current photos and will enable you to cache them in a database for quicker loading. You can only use one photoset but it will collect the photos by tags.  The program also deals with videos by embedding the flash movie player.  This is your standard gallery of photos and doesn’t really do imaginative things. You can paginate the galleries however. It will also allow you to insert a single photo into content of your blog. The one good thing is it allows you to collect your photos from your Flickr collection. This plug-in uses the lightbox.

Grou Random Image Widget

With this widget it enables you to show a random image from your folder images. This means the page loads are cut down as only the image is changed. You can do a fade in and out image load. There are 9 different picture frames you can choose from and you can also link to the full image if you so wish. Rather a neat application.

WP Image Tagger

To get good marks from out teacher Google and their spiders we need to tag our photos. This means the spiders understand what the image is about. That is of course if we have thought out our tags properly. Tags need to be relevant to the content and the subject of the blog. In order to tag the photos easily we use the plug-in which not only allows you to tag them but it also places them in categories and integrates the tags into the whole system of the blog. You can then associate them to your photos with the editor and also list the images available on your site and are connected. It makes it possible to do a search of the images on your blog by the tags. It gives a greater possibility of telling the viewing public what is available to see on your site.

Images and photos are a good way to improve any blog or website. They tell a story far more easily than words do. That is unless of course you are a poetry or prose expert.  There are many ways of editing and using photos images and slideshows on WordPress to give your blog a new lift.

There are several different photographic formats that are available to be used, but you need to choose the best one for what you are actually going to be using the image for.
 
Different available choices

Portable Network Graphics .png

.png can be used for both Graphics and for Photographs on your site, but you need to remember that some of the older search engines out there cannot see this extension. The resultant photo can be saved in the full 256 colors when you use PNG-8.  If you use PNG -24 it saves 24 bit color. This tends to lead to a larger file size than you would get with a JPEG.

Graphics Interchange Format .gif

This format is used more commonly for actual graphics like logos, etc. Png was actually created to replace .gif for monetary reasons as the licenses of Gif were rather high before the scheme imposed on Gif ran out. This is used with animation as well.

Joint Photographic Expert Group .jpeg

This format is a lossy format which means you do lose a percentage of the actual image, although this is hardly noticeable. The compression rate with this can be adjusted to suit you thus saving on both uploading and downloading times. This is still the most popular method of using photographs on the net although .png should at sometime take over.  There is a new JPEG format in the making and this should be out in the future.

Once you have decided on your photo extension you need to decide what you are going to do on your website with various photos.
If you have a large number of posts that need photos and the blog is fairly old, and it will take time to upload them and post them individually. As yet there is no widget or plug-in to achieve this, but I would think someone will now be putting their thinking cap on.

There are many other ways of posting as well but all of them of a single photo are available with different WordPress plug-ins such as Post videos, etc. There is a vast range of these programs. Here you will find plug-ins for all items like galleries and slide shows.  WordPress Codex tells you in detail how “to wrap your text around your file” and there is another article on “Using Images” in your posts.

SEO Gallery is a good plug-in to use as it does tags and all the necessary SEO work for your Photos without using Flash.

Should you want to get really fancy and put in a panoramic view into your blog, there is a plug-in called WP PtViewer, which allows you to do this. If you want to learn more about this plug-in you need to visit to Marvin Labs.

One of the biggest problems if it can be called that is that WordPress was originally designed as a means of blogging. Over the years and its not that many it has grown at an enormous rate, and its uses have changed. To accommodate this plug-ins have been made to enable it to be used for different means. Today you have e-commerce sites, business sites, artists’ portfolios and photo galleries to say the least of them.  The number of sites built on this platform is well over 25 million and counting.
With so many types of the site using the same basic platform obviously different people want different things. Result is the basic WordPress gets customized.
When you don’t need something it’s pretty simple to change what is seen while not altering the basic principle of the WordPress core. You do this by means of using the actions or the filters which you can activate or deactivate.

There is a marvelous selection of snippets available, courtesy of wp-snippets,
Where you can find just the snippet you need.

Let’s customize

The first thing we are going to do is disable the Dashboard widgets we don’t want. This we will do in the dashboard setup area.
Let’s look at functions.php. You should have this in your files, but if you don’t there are several text editors available where you can make one. Text Editors list.

You are going to use the unset() function. When you add_action by using the wp_dashboard_setup in your functions your second line will be remove_dashboard_widgets. You code for removing the unnecessary ones will be as follows:

More information on this subject is available from the WordPress Doc.
There are 12 standard widgets on WordPress, many of which you don’t use. Any you don’t use can be deactivated by unregistering them. Log into your functions.php and remove_some_wp_widgets.

Now it’s time to clear up the menu in the Admin area.
Use the following code:

Sub menus get removed in a similar fashion:

If you do a search in the wp-admin/menu.php, you should find the names of the items you wish to remove.

If you wish to remove the subeditor menu you do it in a slightly different way by using the remove_action().

In the Meta box area there are several items we can remove.
On thing to disable is the track back feature.

Removing some of the items from the posts and also the page columns is possible by using a add_filter ()

This clears the counts from this area.

Your drop down menu of the favorites can be customized as well.
The way to do this is by using an action.

The logo of course you can alter and most do. You can do it both in the Log in page and in the header.

With these few codes you have done a considerable alteration to your WordPress and also taken away items that were not being uses. This does make a difference to the whole working of the theme and WordPress. There are probably many more ways you can customize it to your needs and if you search you will probably find ways but using the similar type of function commands.