10 Free Plugins for Taming the WordPress Media Library

The WordPress Media Library is one of the most used portions of the popular CMS. And, while it’s certainly been improved over time, there are still some things that we’d like to tweak.

Things like easily optimizing images, bulk management and other enhancements that can make for a more powerful and efficient user experience.

Let’s check out some free plugins that you can use to truly take control of media files in your WordPress website.

Enable Media Replace


One of my biggest pet peeves inside WordPress is replacing a document or image that’s referenced from more than one place. This is particularly difficult on a large site. Enable Media Replace adds a dialog that will allow you to go in and either upload a new file in the same spot as the old one or upload a new file using a new URL and change all file references to reflect the new address.

Media from FTP


If you have a lot of media files to add to your WordPress site, Media from FTP can be a real timesaver. Upload your files via FTP and the plugin will register them in the WordPress Media Library. You can even schedule it to look in a directory for regular, periodic uploads.

Enhanced Media Library


Enhanced Media Library helps you customize media to fit your needs. You can categorize and tag files in multiple ways. Plus, the plugin provides various ways to filter and display your media both inside the WordPress backend and on the frontend of your site.

Quick Featured Images


Using Quick Featured Images, you can bulk manage the WordPress featured images in your posts. Set, remove or replace featured images in multiple posts. You can also set default featured images based on defined properties like post categories or tags.

Media Credit


Media Credit creates an easy way to display attribution for a photo or graphic on your website. The plugin will even keep track of files attributed to a particular person and can display them in an archive.

Media Cleaner


Over time, your Media Library can become cluttered with items you’re no longer using. With Media Cleaner, you’ll be able to filter out which items aren’t currently being used and remove them from the server.

Media Files Background Color


This one’s a bit of a niche, but can really improve usability for those who need it. If your library tends to feature white or light-colored images on a transparent background, they can be nearly impossible to see properly. Media Files Background Color lets you add a colored background behind these images for easier viewing in the Media Library.

Imsanity


Imsanity will automatically scale down large image uploads to a more “sane” size. Set your maximum image dimensions and JPG quality and the plugin takes care of the rest.

Image Watermark


With Image Watermark, you’ll be able to automatically add a watermark to images uploaded to through the WordPress Media Library or bulk-add to existing images. The plugin also includes the ability to disable right-clicking of images for copy protection.

Compress JPEG & PNG images


Compress JPEG & PNG images uses the TinyJPG and TinyPNG compression services to optimize your site’s images. In particular, TinyPNG is quite adept at lowering the file sizes of transparent PNG images – even rather complex ones.

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