VIDEO The strange counter intuitive flow of the WordPress Cropping tool

by | Mar 14, 2017 | WordPress Tips

The WordPress Media Library provides a free but strange image cropping tool and editing system. With this article and video, we demonstrate how to crop an image.  The WordPress Support library is a bit vague on how to kick off the image editing and cropping process, finish it and save the work!
So we fixed that!
Two Tricks to look for

  1. To kick things off, we simply have to start dragging and dropping on the little image on the left in the editor.  That will create a drag like box.
  2. Then we hit the crop button! (hitting the crop button to start the crop process would normally feel like the proper order, it is reversed in WordPress Image editing.)
  3. Which save button is the save button? -> The save button right under the image we just edited, should be ‘Saved’ first. Then hit the ‘Update’ button on the far right second!

 

Video – How to Crop Images in WordPress Media Library

Picresize - resize image dimensions in batches-min

Need to Batch Resize Images?

PicResize lets you resize images in batches.  Say you have 20 images that are 4800x 3000 pixels and that is far too wide and tall to display on a website or in WordPress.  So you run them through this service (all the images at once) and have Picresize change the dimensions down proportionately so that none of the pictures are wider than 1200 pixels!
Note this will reduce the file size too, but will not fully optimize the image file yet. See Optimizilla for that.
Yep! You guessed it.  Both of these ‘Free’ online tools are chock full of ads! That’s how they make their money.
Optimizilla batch file resize images-min

Optimize Image file sizes in batches

Optimizilla does not resize your picture dimensions, but short of individually running them through Photoshop or Gimp offline, this will do batches of images quickly and let you download them on the spot in a zip file to then upload into your website.

Someone reached out to me after I originally created this article. Since I created it, TinyPNG has been my go to service for WordPress image optimization work in general.

However, I got this email from Ionut (feel like I might have spoken with him before from a different site, the email reach out felt like an SEO link building type of thing).

The service ResizeMyIMG.com

I took a quick look at the service and at first glance, it was basic looking, and I felt like, great another tool… Next!

BUT!

I went one step further and tried it out and it was the interface for optimization that was actually really cool. There’s a handy drag drop / touch pad finger gesture resizer with lots of presets as you can see here, plus, below it (no image) lots of controls for the output file size too.

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