I should spend more time talking to designers. An excellent designer I’m working with on a few projects noticed me Googling for a sample image to put into a new site design, and told me about Unsplash. It’s a major step up.

David wrote a really good article on WordPress site speed a few weeks ago. He also, casually, made WPShout a lot faster—up to an 89% desktop score on PageSpeed Insights, which is about as high as I’ve ever seen a WordPress site score.

A big part of my job is “saving what my computer screen looks like,” also called screenshotting. Most of the time the “prt sc” button works fine, but on occasion I’ll want to screenshot something longer than the height of my computer screen itself, such as a long scrolling single-page site.

Using Creative Commons-licensed images lets you take advantage of the incredible diversity of stuff on the internet, without violating anyone’s intellectual property. It’s where we get most of our article featured images from, for example.

You know who’s really great? Pippin Williamson.

I really love being able to set custom image sizes in WordPress. The power and flexibility this system opens up for building beautiful, easy-to-administer, performant websites is hard to overstate.

There are lots of ways to search for free-to-use images: a Flickr search with Attribution, a Google image search with the “reuse with modification” filter, and now a new one: CC Search.

I’ve loved TinyPNG for a long time, but didn’t realize until quite recently that they’ve got a WordPress plugin. I just tried it on a client’s site, and it’s amazing: automatic lossless image compression for all .jpg and .png images uploaded through the Media uploader. That means that all your images are exactly the same, but have smaller filesizes.

It’s a bit odd that WordPress doesn’t let you rename your media files. For a feature with some usability questions and a lot of SEO questions (Google, of course, reads the filenames of images as a clue to what they’re about), it’s surprising that WordPress’s best out-of-the-box solution is to simply delete and reupload whatever files you’d like to have renamed.

Today’s quick guide is a browser hack that I find useful constantly in my work in WordPress—and quite often when I’m just browsing the internet. It lets you view the full-sized version of any image on a WordPress site—even one that’s only available in a thumbnail size by default.