ImageManager for Wordpress – plugin review
One of the first things I do when I’ve set up a new Wordpress blog, whether it’s a regular blog or a site using Wordpress as a CMS (content management system), is adding the ImageManager plugin. Yes, I’ll add myself to one of those who think Wordpress’ built in image uploader and manager is kind of crappy.
Anyway, the ImageManager plugin integrates the stand alone PHP ImageManager + Editor (site down at the moment) with Wordpress. It gives you a decent image uploader with thumbnails, CSS styling and so on, as well as a small editor to crop, rotate, flip and scale images. The editor is OK, but you really should do this in a dedicated program (like Photoshop or The Gimp) as it’s a lot better.
The plugin itself was made by Per Soderlind and is easy enough to install – just upload and activate. There’s an options page in the administrative area where you’ll tell it where stuff should be stored and other settings, most of which you don’t need to alter. Good for us advanced users though.
I’m very pleased with the ImageManager plugin and, as I said, use it all the time. The one thing it doesn’t do so good, however, is listing images and folders. If you get a lot of those you’ll have to scroll a lot, and it can sometimes be hard to find what you’re looking for. A revision here would be nice. Also, the way folders are displayed makes the folder names screw up the list sometimes if they’re too long. Not a big deal, but ugly and I don’t like that.
Nevertheless, this is the best plugin for handling occasional images. It’s not right for you if you’re after an image gallery or something, but for regular blogging it’s essential.
[rate 4]