Wednesday, November 27, 2019

Organize Your Media in Folders With the FileBird WordPress Plugin

Websites today are media-driven. Images, videos, and audio files help connect your audience with your website.  Whether you are selling a product, providing information through a tutorial, or getting someone to sign up for your monthly membership, related media content can help you achieve the goals of your website. 

Unfortunately, the WordPress dashboard does not allow for the most user-friendly organization of your media files. The media section in your WordPress dashboard lacks a folder structure that gives the ability to easily categorize and sort through all the media files on your website. 

This creates a much more difficult post and page creation experience and makes updating your website a much more time-consuming process than it needs to be. The FileBird WordPress Media Library Folder plugin lets you take control of your media library and let you focus on building and updating your website in a hassle-free way. Through the use of a folder system, this powerful WordPress plugin will let you create a nested folder system that can be organized based on how you run your website. 

In this article, I am going to show you how to organize your media library and create an eye-catching food blog in no time!


 

What We Will Be Building

No matter what type of WordPress website you are running, you will need a way to organize your media files in the back-end of the site. In this article, we will be the owners of a food blog that puts together recipes for different types of food. The default media library currently does not allow us to organize our food photos to allow us to easily put together these recipes on different pages of our website. 

With the FileBird WordPress plugin, we will create three dedicated folders for the types of recipes we will have on our food blog, pasta, seafood, and meat. To further organize our media library, we will then add subfolders to these three categories of food. Once we have this organization system in place, we will then begin constructing our blog pages with all our recipes and our organized media library. 

Here is a photo of one of the blog pages with our recipes will look like once we organize our images and build out the recipe page. 

File Bird WordPress Plugin Building a Food Blog

Organizing the Media Library 

Once you have installed the File Bird WordPress plugin, head on over to WP Dashboard > Media > Library. This will open up the default media library. Already, you will notice a new section has appeared to the left of the media library called folders. This is where will create our organization system. 

The first action we are going to take to build our food blog is to upload all the photos of the different categories of food. We will click on Add New > Select Files and select six food images to be uploaded.

Once these images are uploaded it is time to start categorizing them. As mentioned we have three types of food categories that we want to create. Next to the Folders header on the top left of the media library dashboard, click the New Folder button. A new folder will appear in the FileBird folder column and we will type in Pasta. Repeat this process two more times for the Seafood and Meat categories. 

FileBird Categories and Subcategories

Since we want an even greater level of organization to be able to quickly navigate our media library, we are going to create a subfolder for each of our parent categories. To add these subfolders, we will click on the first folder labeled Pasta. Then we will click the new folder button and this will add a subfolder under Pasta. We will add two subfolders here labeled White Sauce and Red Sauce. We will repeat this process for the other two parent categories as well. For the meat category, we will add Chicken and Beef subfolders. For the seafood category, we will add Shrimp and Salmon subfolders.

As far as the organization that we will need for our food blog, these are as many subfolders as we need. Depending on the needs of your website even more subcategories can be created. You can create up to 7 different subcategories if you require this. 

Also, the folders that you create in the media library are drag and drop. So if you need to rearrange your folder system at any time, just drag and drop them into the desired location. 

To complete the organization of our media we are going to drag and drop each image into its respective folder in the media library dashboard. 

FileBird Organized Images

Creating the Food Blog Recipe Pages

Now it is time to create the actual pages that will contain the recipes and the images that we organized. Choose Pages > Add New from the WordPress admin sidebar. The first set of recipes we will add to our blog will be pasta. In the header type in Pasta. From there, we will type in Red Sauce Pasta in an H4 heading. Below the header, we will then add our pasta image. In the default WordPress page builder we will click on the image icon to add our pasta image. Click on the Media Library button next and a pop up will appear with the media library grid along with the FileBird folder system on the left-hand side. We will now select our pasta image in the Red Sauce subfolder. 

FileBird Adding images to page

Now it is time to add our instructions and ingredients to the recipe page so our blog viewers can copy our recipes at home. We will insert this right below the image that we just added. 

While we don't have a large number of images in our media library at the moment, you can still see that this organization really helps you create your posts and pages as quickly as possible. 

We will rinse and repeat this process for every recipe that we have. We will create two more pages titled Seafood and Meat and add the titles, images, and ingredients, and instructions. 

There you have it! We were successfully able to add images to our media library, organize them in a folder system, and quickly create our recipe blog posts. 

To watch the media organization and creation of the food blog, check out the video below. 

 

Getting the Most Out of the Plugin

The FileBird WordPress plugin is a basic utility plugin that is a must-have if you are adding media to your website. The functionality of the plugin is rather straight forward. As outlined above, it gives the ability to create a folder system to create an organization system that does not exist by default on WordPress.

In our example, we added images to our media library and organized them by food type to be featured on our food blog. However, there are other ways that you could organize your media library with the folder system. Here are some helpful tips to consider when organizing your library. 

1. Think About What Categories of Media You Will Have 

If you are running an eCommerce clothing website, you will want to have multiple subcategories. For example, you could be selling shirts and have this as a parent category. Under this parent category, you could have size, color, and brand. Taking it a step further you could have a second and third subcategory. Under shirts, you could have a subcategory that has folders for Adult and Children sizes and then another subcategory under Adult with small, medium, and large folders.

FileBird Subcategories

2. Organize by Page or Post Title

If you are adding media that you know will go on a certain page or post, you can always create folders that have the title of this page or post so you can quickly navigate to them when you are creating your pages. 

3. Organize by Date

WordPress allows you to view media that was added in a specific month but not by year or day. You could create folders for media taken on certain days, for example for photos of events. 

Conclusion

The FileBird WordPress plugin may not be the most feature-rich and exciting plugin, but it is an absolute necessity for WordPress website owners. Modern websites require you to have images, videos, and audio displayed on your website for a more visually pleasing experience. The FileBird WordPress plugin gives the ability to organize all the media on your website so you save time and focus on the more important tasks of running your business and website. 

To give this plugin a try, head over to CodeCanyon and check it out! And while you're here, check out some of the other great WordPress plugins available from CodeCanyon.

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