Hi Adam,

I have been receiving images from my customers and uploading them into my posts for awhile now with no problems, but lately I’ve run into an issue I hope you can help solve. Usually after uploading an image I get to choose from the size of the image to insert into my pages or posts. The sizes to choose from are Thumbnail, Medium, Large, and Original. I have a couple questions regarding some inconsistencies I’m seeing.

Why do I get all of these size choices with some images and other times I only get Thumbnail, Medium, and Original (no Large)?

Why do the available sizes of these images change? Sometimes the medium size will be 300 x 300 and other times it will be smaller (like 250 x 250) The same thing happens with the Large size too, but the above things only happen sometimes? I would like to make an image fill the entire width of my posts just like the text does, but depending on the image, sometimes my only choice is either too large or too small for this area.

Thanks for your continued support, we appreciate all your help!

Alexa

While offering Alexa the solution and explanation of why this happens and how to correct it, it occurred to me that even with the many years experience I have of working with WordPress, I very seldom took advantage of a built-in image and media setting that can really help to create consistency when using images in your posts and pages, not to mention making things easier for you.

The first thing you’ll need to know is how wide your content area is. In other words, what is the maximum width that you can have for each image. The width you have to work with is directly related to the theme you have installed and activated on your site. There are a couple ways to find out the width of the content area of your specific theme, but for the purpose of this tutorial, I’ll be using the WordPress default theme named Twenty Ten. I know that the content area has a maximum width of 640px, and that’s how wide I want my uploaded images to be.

Post Content Width

The desire was to display these product posts and their categories like an online catalog without the need for e-commerce capability. This meant that the categories needed a more visual display instead of a standard list, and this needed to be included on category archive pages. To achieve this, I turned to the Thematic theme framework, category page templates, and most important for my visual layout, the Category-Icons plugin by Sub.

Add a second block of HTML content to WordPress pages. A perfect solution for layouts with two distinct content areas or “blocks”, such as a sidebar or two column view. When editing a page, a second WordPress WYSIWYG content editor will appear beneath the standard page editing block.

The description goes on to explain that whatever you enter into this second HTML content area, can be output to your page in a couple of ways. You can add the “Secondary HTML Content” widget to your sidebar or you can use a function inside your template. This video only covers the widget usage.

Thanks for taking the time to watch this video. Please feel free to leave comments below with further questions.