The short answer: No.

It is true, the WordPress Media Library is like one of those shoe boxes from the old days filled with pictures. Photos are added on top of the previous ones. There is no way to find a photo by tag or date taken. Well, it isn’t as bad as it seem, but first back to the answer.

The Media Library contains your images that you uploaded for use in posts. If you reorganized the contents of the library, moving photos into new folders by subject or some other indexing method, the URL of the images would change. Since the current URLs are used in your blog posts, those links would be broken. Your old posts would be all messed up. (That is not entirely correct, but I will leave that as a mystery statement for now.) Do not try to reorganize your Media Library even when it gets close to your storage limit with thousands of pictures. But don’t be disappointed that you can’t reorganize your library.

Here is the good news

Clearly you want to reorganize so you can find an image quickly. You actually can. Your photos are in reverse order of upload date. The most recent is at the top of the library. The very first image you uploaded is last. By default WordPress creates a folder for each month in which you upload images. You can easily reach any of those folders by clicking the All dates field. A drop-down menu lets you pick the folder for any month.

This brings up the photos you uploaded in the selected month.

But wait, there is more!

There is a Search field. Just type in that field and the images with matching text in their data fields, like Title or Caption, will be displayed.

The illustration here shows that the text “fl” was typed in the Search field. Two images come up.

Here is the first one:

The matching “fl” is in the word “Butterflies” – the text does not have to be at the start of a word, it can be inside! The other images was a match because the word “Reflections” was in the title. Pretty neat, wouldn’t you agree? See, you really don’t need to reorganize!

.:.

© 2017 Ludwig Keck

Two ways come to mind. Reach in through a window or “walk” in through the dashboard. Sorry about this levity, but really these are routes to your WordPress Media Library. Let’s take the formal path first: Go to your WordPress Dashboard. The way there is by going in your browser to address yourblog/wp-admin, where “yourblog” is the web address of your blog.

If your blog is on WordPress.com, that is, the address is like blogname.wordpress.com, you can access the Dashboard by going to wordpress.com, click My Sites and scroll down to the bottom in the left pane. There click WP Admin.

Notice the red arrow in the illustration above. It shows the URL of your Dashboard when you move the pointer over the WP Admin link.

In the Dashboard click Media in the left pane, or Library in the drop-down menu.

Here you can also see, in the lower left of your browser window, the URL of your Media Library.

Yes, of course, I could have told you about this address first, but it is just a little more complicated, that is longer, and harder to remember.

Your Media Library is the online location where your images, and some other media, are stored for use in your blog posts.

The storage order is by upload. The earliest item is at the bottom of this possibly very big “shoe box”. The most recently uploaded image is at the top.

Now I did tease with another way to get into your Media Library. It is a little convoluted and not at all intuitive, but for some tasks it is the easier way.

Once again you can start at WordPress.com. Click My Sites, then Blog Posts. Either open to edit an existing post or click Add. This gets you into the online WordPress Editor.

Click the circled plus icon to insert content, and a window to your Media Library opens. You can pick an image to insert into your post, but you can do a number of other tasks. We’ll save those for another article.

Next question, please.

.:.

© 2017 Ludwig Keck