Mike DiBenedetto dot com

By not customizing your default image size settings in wordpress, you risk having badly sized images.

After I wrote the previous post on this blog, I was very unhappy with the tiny size that I choose for the Reddit screenshots.  Actually, I didn’t choose them at all.  It was the default settings for medium sized images in WordPress 2.7.  I tried using the large image setting but it was too big for my column width.  Sure, I could have manually resized the image but I didn’t.

That’s because default settings are powerful things.  They determine way more of your life than you’d probably like to admit.  I will be posting a short brainstorm in the coming days about the ways that changing common default settings could drastically alter our lives.

For now, I’d like to make a few suggestions about changing your image size default settings in WordPress 2.7.

Step 1: Click on “Media” in the Settings Menu

Step 2: Set the Medium Size width to half of the width of your main column and the Large Size width to a few pixels less than the full width of your main column.

Changing default image sizes saves time and makes your blog look better.

By having the large size correspond to your maximum width, you can easily make images take up the entire column.  And by setting medium size to half the width, you can easily insert images that can float to the left or right and have text wrap around them.