WordPress Image Attachment Details

The Attachment Details fields show up any time you add an image to a post or page

Screen grab of the Attachment Details fields in WordPress

Detail view of the Attachment Details fields in WordPress including fields for Title, Caption, Alt Text, and Description.

By Morten Rand-Hendriksen

Morten Rand-Hendriksen is a staff author at LinkedIn Learning and lynda.com specializing in WordPress and web design and development and an instructor at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. He is a popular speaker and educator on all things design, web standards and open source. As the owner and Web Head at Pink & Yellow Media, a boutique style digital media company in Burnaby, BC, Canada, he has created WordPress-based web solutions for multi-national companies, political parties, banks, and small businesses and bloggers alike. He also contributes to the local WordPress community by organizing Meetups and WordCamps.

3 replies on “WordPress Image Attachment Details”

Hello, Morten –

I stepped through your post several times, including clicking on the images. So (if I understand correctly), each image gets its own page.

But I’m having trouble understanding how to “store once, use many.”

I have writing samples (PDFs) that I want to showcase by client, by genre, and possibly one or two other ways. Consequently, my linking words will have slight variations. For example, on the Client page the link might be “bylaws” and on the Genre page it might be “bylaws for a professional association.”

As best I can tell, to get the link text, I have to replace the filename (in the Title field). Which means for each unique instance of link text, I must associate a unique instance of the file. So if I have 4 contexts for linking, then I must also have 4 copies of the same PDFs.

Please tell me this is not so!

I am using WordPress 3.9, so I don’t have any old habits to unlearn. I am, however, a WordPress novice, so I need instructions that Grandpa can understand.

Thank you,
Rose

P.S. I’ve seen your tutorials on Lynda.com (it’s been awhile, but as I recall it was your explanation of WordPress.com versus WordPress.org that finally “clicked” for me about the differences). My Lynda account is suspended right now. But if you have a tutorial that explains what I need using WPress 3.9, then I will happily reactivate my account.

Hi Rose. Each attachment has its own attachment page, but this is just where you see the attachment in it’s “natural state” so to speak. When you add a non-image item like a PDF to a post or page you get a link directly to that item (in your case the PDF). Once the link is placed on your post or page you can change the link text to say whatever you like. Hope that makes sense.

Morten,

This Web site has approximately 90 watercolor images, with each image/painting on its own page displaying a name, media type and size above it with no other language on the page.

Although I have provided a meta description for the Home, Collection, Bio, Q&A and Contact pages located in the navigation menu, should I bother to write a description for each of the individual image pages? If so, how should that language be written: would I simply describe each of the paintings in terms of shape(s), color(s), etc.?

I have done exactly that for the alt text fields for each painting. Should I just repeat that same language in the meta description field? Any light you can shed on this would be much appreciated.

By the way, for the record the site was created using Sandvox 2.2.5.

Thank you.

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