There is some confusion with terms. “Captions” are the visual text under an image. “Alternative Text” or ALT descriptions are hidden within the HTML image tag and are required by law to be descriptive of the image, not a story or more than a few words describing the image for the visually impaired. The “title” of the image is a short title, like “The Mona Lisa,” which gives the image a name.

To create an image that will link to a larger version of the image, set it to be an attachment. This will automatically put a link around the image. When the image is clicked, it will take the user to a larger view on a web page of your site called the attachment page.

Images can be put into a slideshow as well.

If you would like to tell more of the story of the image, why not write about it in the post. The image is there and the text will be above, below, or around it, helping people learn more about the story behind the image. This is the easiest way to tell the story of the picture.

I hope this helps. Sometimes we make these things more complicated than they need to be, so keep it simple. Thanks.

I am having so much trouble figuring out either how to have longer descriptive captions (often requiring translation) or easily directing a viewer to a location where they can see a fuller description of the image. In that case, I would include a short caption fitting for the limited frame allowed within gallery and then easily direct a viewer to a fuller description. I’ve tried adding an instruction to click “permalink” (see Day 1 gallery), but that doesn’t take the viewer to a fuller description. But within media gallery, I can go to attachment and see the title, caption, and description. The point is to resolve this problem for the viewer within the slide show. When I figure out a solution, I will apply it to all the galleries and continue to add new ones. I went from a free university wordpress site to the paid option with wordpress.com yesterday hoping to figure out this problem. Please help me.Thank you. frances hasso

The time suck of the media handling process for WordPress is continuing to go back and forth to the Media Manager/Uploader to add a single image when you have many images (not in a gallery) throughout a post. The File Gallery WordPress Plugin solves that issue for self-hosted versions of WordPress. In general, I’m finding the new media interface easier to use.

However – it does NOT save the changes to ‘custom url’ and defaults back to ‘http://’ every time. Arg!

Please – bring back the save changes button!!