Using the Media Grid

- While the index views for posts and pages are virtually identical, the media index received a complete overhaul not too many versions ago. Rather than a list-based display, the default setting for the media index is a grid view known as the Media Grid. The Media Grid displays all of your media items and makes them easy to preview. For images you see a small square thumbnail. For other media items, you see a logo representing what type of file the item is as well as the file name. When you click on an item, it opens in a modal window and you get to see a larger version of the image or document as well as all its attachment details.

You'll notice that this display is not all that different from the one you get when you insert a media item from the Content Editor. However, there are certain differences. In the top right-hand corner, you can use these arrows to navigate between existing media items without having to close down the modal window. You can also use this window to permanently delete items if you like, and remember this is permanent. If you delete them they go away from all pages and posts where you might have added that item. You can change the attachment details for any image or other media item, and that information is changed for the image or media item itself as well as how it's being displayed in the attachment page.

However, the caption and old text is not changed in posts and pages where you have already added that image. That's because the caption and old text become permanent HTML components within the posts or page. So with changing these two fields will only affect future insertions of this image in future posts and pages. Finally, from this modal window, you can see what user uploaded this particular media item and which post or page it was uploaded to.

You can also view the attachment page and edit the attachment page, but we'll talk more about that in the next movie. In some circumstances, it may be useful to upload media items directly into the Media Editor. That might be if you have a lot of images, or a lot of other documents that you may want to add into posts or pages in the future. Or there are some other circumstances where this might be helpful as well. If so, you can go either to media and add new in the Admin menu, or you can go to the media library and click Add New.

This gives you a drag-and-drop functionality just like you get inside the Content Editor where you can drag-and-drop content directly onto the Media Library and add in the same kind of information you would in the Content Editor. The only difference is these new media items will not be attached to any post or page, but will live on their own until you attach them to a post or page. The Media Grid has its own bulk editor, but it's limited to only one function, to permanently delete content. If you want to use it, simply go to the toolbar here at the top, click Bulk Select, select the items you want to delete and click Delete Selected.

But like I said, this will permanently erase these items from your WordPress installation. And if you have them in a page or post somewhere, instead of getting the image, you'll instead get broken HTML. So this is something you need to do with great caution. I'm going to cancel this selection. For some features, you may need to get more detail control over your media items, or you may not like the display of this media grid. In that case, you can toggle the button on the far left-hand side of the toolbar here at the top and change the display of your Media Libary from a grid to a list view.

The list view works exactly the same way that the list view for posts and pages except you have slightly fewer options. If you hover over an item, you can either edit it, this takes you directly to the Attachment Page Editor. You can view the item, this takes you directly to the attachment page on the front end and you can delete the item permanently. But more interestingly, you have all the information you need on the right-hand side here including author, so which user uploaded this item, and what item it was uploaded to. This can be especially useful if you want to delete items and then you're not sure if they're currently attached to a post or a page, and it can be useful if you want to detach an item from a post or page for some reason.

You see, a media item can curently only be attached to either one page or one post, and there are certain circumstances where you may want to call up all the items that were attached to a specific page or post. And in that case, you can use this function to detach an image from one post and attach it to another simply by clicking Detach and then going back and clicking Attach and finding the item you want to attach it to. This doesn't change whether or not the item is displayed in that post or page, but it changes whether or not you can auto-generate a gallery from that particular post or page.

So now you know how to manage media from the Media Library. For now you can switch between the grid and the old index view and figure out which one you like the most. But chances are in the not-too-distant future the traditional view will go away. So I recommend getting used to using the grid view as your primary editor here.