Adding an image to Joomla! 1.5 is very straight forward, providing you know where to find the image upload button! This method can be used with whichever editor you have installed.

Here’s how…

Open the article that you wish to place the image into (Content – Article Manager – Click the title of the article).

You cannot upload an image using the WYSIWYG image icon.

To add an image to the page by clicking the image button on the BOTTOM of the pane.

This brings up the upload pane. Browse either the photos already on the website (EG: there is a folder called “Stories” containing images from existing articles), or browse your computer to upload one.

NB: If you are uploading, make sure you resize it to the size it will appear on the site before you upload. Big pictures will slow down your website. Make sure your file name is SEO-friendly (see SEO tip below) and that it is all in lower case and has no spaces in it.

Click “Start Upload” and the picture will be uploaded to the website.

You then need to click on the uploaded picture to highlight it and choose “insert” at the top of the pane in order to place it on the page.

You are given options to style the picture to float to the left or right of the text or to sit above the text (choose “none”). You may also add a caption by ticking “caption” and adding the caption in the “Title” box. You should always add an “image description“. This tells visitors with restricted sight and also the search engines (which cannot see images) what the picture is. This means you should include keywords in your description if possible.

If you wish to change the description or the positioning for an image after you have placed on the page, this is done through the image icon on the WYSIWYG editor. (It is a tree icon).

Highlight the image and click the image icon. This brings up an edit image pane. On the “General” tab, you may add an image description. On the “Appearance” tab. You can then set the alignment.

SEO Tip:

When you resize your image before you upload it, you should also change the file name to include a keyword for the image. Search engines cannot see images, but they read the file name and the alternative description to decide what the image is. So if someone is searching for “widgets”, for example, and you have 100 pictures of widgets on your page, the search engines will only know this is you name the image files “widget-type1″ etc. This can help to improve your ranking in the search engines.