Have you ever wanted to upload pictures or other files to a non-standard area of your wordpress site, but aren’t familiar with FTP?
FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol and is the standard way to upload files to your website. It’s the opposite of http (which you use in your web address – so this website is https://www.seoperth.net.au – see the http?), which is how you download files from your site. For those more technically minded: I know this isn’t quite correct, but it’s good enough for most “normal” people :)
To use FTP, you usually need a program like FileZilla and there’s massive room for error if you don’t know what you’re doing.
By non-standard, I mean the areas other than where wordpress normally uploads plugins, themes and your picture gallery.
I had never seen the need for this, but now I can see a number of useful applications for clients…
You might want to zip a whole lot of files (like pictures), upload them to your site, then extract them when they are there.
There’s also a plugin I recommend called adrotate that takes pictures from its own folder and you would otherwise need to use FTP to get the pictures in place.
What if you wanted to do all of this, but weren’t comfortable using FTP or couldn’t for some reason?
My friend Lesley Dewar, of Stories My Nana Tells, brought my attention to a fantastic little plugin that does all of that.
It’s called WP Easy Uploader. Look for it using the Add New feature in the Plugins menu of your wordpress installation. Just follow the instructions to install and activate it.
If you want to upload your files to, say www.yourdomain.com/images/fun/ you would select the fourth option and put images/fun/ in the box. Make sure you don’t start with a slash (or your domain) and make sure you end with a slash. If you get it wrong, it’ll usually tell you.
It has options for uploading themes and plugins, but since WordPress 2.9 (I think) this is redundant as these features are included with wordpress. If your wordpress installation is up to date (and it really SHOULD be), you won’t need these from this plugin.
It’s so easy and it’ll even create folders for you if they don’t already exist.
Hope that helps :)
Thanks for the mention, Mike. Since I am not as IT savvy as you, I just kept looking until I found something that looked like even I could use it. Asked you about it and I really appreciate you loading it up for me in my website.
Great little tool but why wouldn’t you just use the image uploader that’s built in? Unless you want it in a specific folder.
It’s not just for images. You can upload any file. Better still you can upload a zip file containing multiple images at once. It’s also a lot less hassle if you’re uploading the picture for use elsewhere on your site. Finally, as you pointed out, being able to upload to a folder of yur choice can be a handy feature.