Where Does WordPress Store Images on Your Site?

Are you curious about the location of the image storage that WordPress uses on your website?

A lot of people who are just starting out with WordPress have asked us how the platform stores photos and what they can do to make their media library more organized and user-friendly.

In this tutorial, we’ll walk you through the process of Where Does WordPress Store Images on Your Site. In addition, we will discuss various plugins and programs that might help you arrange your photographs in a more effective manner.

Where Does WordPress Store Images on Your Site?

Your WordPress website is equipped with a built-in system to manage media uploads, such as pictures, videos, audio files, and documents. This system comes standard with WordPress.

This approach makes it simple for you to upload pictures and other types of media to a designated folder on the hosting server for your WordPress site.

After that, the media library in your WordPress installation will display the files. On the Media » Library page, you’ll get access to all of your uploaded files. You have the ability to modify these files, manipulate them, or even delete them directly from this location.

Within WordPress, the folder referred to as the uploads folder can be found nested inside the wp-content directory. This is the location where the picture files are kept.

Your media files are organized by year and month and stored within the uploads folder on your computer. In addition to this, you will also see folders that have been generated by your WordPress plugins in order to store other submissions.

For example, all of the media files that you post in the month of June 2022 will be saved in:

/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/

You may examine these files and directories by connecting to your WordPress hosting account using an FTP client or by utilizing the File Manager software that is located within the control panel of your hosting account.

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You’ll find that each image that was uploaded to your server has multiple copies stored there, as you might expect. When you upload a picture to WordPress, these image sizes are created automatically for you by WordPress.

Along with the image that was originally uploaded, you may also be presented with a thumbnail, medium, and big version of the image.

In addition to that, the theme or plugins that you choose for your WordPress site may also generate additional picture sizes for those individuals to use.

It’s possible that at this point you’re wondering how the media library in WordPress displays information about the files that are stored inside.

In order to accomplish this, WordPress saves information about the images you upload to the database in the form of an attachment post type, which is located within the posts table.

When you place images into posts or pages or any other custom post type, WordPress will additionally record information about those images in the posts meta database. This is separate from the previous point.

When you set a featured picture, for example, WordPress will record this information as a meta key called _thumbnail id and save it in the postmeta table of your database.

WordPress is informed of the precise location of the file on your hosting server by the information contained within your database. If you delete a file from your server using FTP, WordPress will display those photos as broken after you delete the file.

If you delete the reference to an image from your WordPress database, the file will still be there on your hosting server, but it won’t show up in your media library. The same is true if you delete the reference to an image from your WordPress blog.

Changing How WordPress Stores Images and Media Uploads

You will not be able to modify the location of uploads using the administrative interface of WordPress because this setting is disabled by default. Visit the Settings » Media tab to make the one and only modification available to you, which is to turn off the month- and year-based folders.

You may also alter the maximum dimensions in pixels for your picture uploads from this section of the settings.

Users with more experience with WordPress can go to our tutorial to learn how to manually modify the default folder that WordPress uses for uploads.

Organizing Your Images in WordPress

The media library that comes standard with WordPress should meet the needs of the vast majority of users.

On the other hand, if photographs play a more prominent part in your WordPress blog, you might require additional tools to manage your uploads in order to keep everything in order.

If you run a website dedicated to photography, for instance, you might wish to classify your posts as either albums or tags for easier navigation.

You will require a plugin such as Envira Gallery in order to accomplish that. It is a plugin for WordPress that allows you to arrange your photographs into albums, categories, and galleries. The plugin is called Image Gallery.

Where Does WordPress Store Images on Your Site

Allowing Users to Upload Images in WordPress

By default, WordPress grants the ability to upload photos to every user who has the ability to make posts on your website. Users having the Administrator, Author, Editor, and Contributor user roles are included in this category.

But what if you wanted other users on your website to be able to upload photographs without having to log in to the administrative area?

You will require the WPForms plugin in order to accomplish this. It is the most effective form builder plugin for WordPress, and it enables you to simply create any kind of form you would need for your website.

It also includes a file upload field that enables users to effortlessly post photographs, documents, and other things without having to create a user account or access the WordPress admin area. This field is included as part of the standard package.

To begin, you will need to download and install the WPForms plugin before activating it. Check out our comprehensive walkthrough of how to install a WordPress plugin for more information and specifics.

Following the activation of WPForms, you will need to navigate to the WPForms » Settings page in order to enter your license key. On the WPForms website, you may get this information in the “Account” section of your profile.

The next step is to create an image upload form for your website by going to the WPForms > Add New page.

To begin, you will need to give your form a title of some kind. After that, you can hunt for a template for File Upload Form to get started with the next step.

The interface for the form builder will now load for WPForms, and it will automatically load form fields based on the template for the File Upload Form.

A field for uploading files will be included in the form by default. You have the ability to modify the labels of the fields on your form, add or delete fields, and rearrange their order.

You may alter the parameters for the File Upload field by clicking on the field itself. You have the ability to select which file types a user can upload, as well as the maximum number of files they can upload. You can also set a maximum file size limit.

After you have completed everything, you can save your form before leaving the form builder.

The following step is to either generate a new post or page, or to edit an existing post or page. Proceed to add a WPForms block to the content area while you are on the screen for editing the post.