Embedding an image to the Basic text component

If your image is a graph, flowchart, map or includes text descriptions, you need to follow the steps to add this as complex image component instead.

How to name your files

Our CMS contains thousands of image files, so it's important to name your file well so that you and your colleagues can find and reuse them.

There are 2 different naming conventions to keep in mind:

The filename of the image (what it is saved as on your computer, e.g. very-important-image.jpg)
The media item name you give the image when you upload it to the CMS media library (e.g. Shrine profiles John Lui).

Filename

Your filename should:

be descriptive
contain no spaces
use hyphens (not underscores) to separate the words and make the filename as easy to read as possible
not be a generic file name like IMG_001.jpg.

For example, an image of a girl laughing should be saved as 'girl-laughing.jpg' before uploading to the CMS Media Library.

If the image's filename contains spaces (e.g. 'girl laughing.jpg') you must replace the spaces with hyphens).

Media item name

The name you give your image when you upload it to the CMS's Media Library must:

use spaces between words (not hyphens or underscores)
be meaningful and descriptive enough that you can search for it when required

if the image is of a specific person, include their name and position.

For example:

Hon Linda Dessau, Governor of Victoria

Alana Johnson, member of the Ministerial Council on Women's Equality

Example

A screenshot of the Media Library in the CMS, showing the image upload screen.

In the above example, the image's filename is "girl-laughing.jpg" so the name you would give it for the Media Library is "Girl laughing".

Keep in mind that what you put in the Name field doesn't appear unless it is part of an Image gallery component.

If you're uploading several images that belong together, such as members of a council or honour roll inductees, it's a good idea to put this consistently in the image names, for easier searching. For example: "Stella Young – 2017 Women's Honour Roll".

How to upload and embed images

In the Basic text component, click on the Media icon in the formatting ribbon.
Search for your image from the Library tab if uploading an existing image.
If you’re uploading an image for the first time, click on Add image, then Choose file and browse your computer for your image.

Complete the Name field. Make the name of the file meaningful to the image, so it can be easily found when searching the Media library. If it’s a photo of a well-known person, you should include their name and position in the image title. Refer to the section about naming images for more tips, but as a general rule:

The filename of your image (what it's saved as on your computer) should use hyphens between words, not spaces.
The name you give your image when you upload it to the CMS should use spaces between words.

Complete the Alternative text field for your image (if required). This is a description for vision-impaired users and is an important accessibility requirement. What you write depends on the context of the page and the typical users.

The only images that don't need this field to be filled out are:

Sensory images: if the image is intended to create a sensory experience – for example, an image of an artwork.
Decorative images: if the image is pure decoration, used for visual purposes only.

For these types of images, you can leave the alt text field blank. In the page's code there will be two double quotes, which tells the screen reader to skip it.

License: You'll need to choose one of the following license types in the drop down menu:

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 means the image can be shared or adapted. See https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ page for more information.
Copyright means that the image is protected and cannot be used without permission. Use Copyright if you're not confident the image can be shared with others.

At this stage the 'Restricted' checkbox doesn't do anything in the SDP instance of Drupal, so ignore this.

Click Save and you’ll see the Embed media option pop-up.

Click Embed.

If you want to add multiple images to your page displayed in a carousel format, you can find instructions in our image gallery guide.

How to embed smaller images

When you're inserting an image in body content, the width is important because the website displays images according to the device screen size (breakpoint).

Landscape images should be 818px wide and no more than 500px high.

If a narrower image is embedded in the body text of a page, it will be expanded to fill the column width on some smaller devices. If the image file is too small it will appear pixelated. (If an image is taller than 500px it will be made narrower to display the full height. See the examples further down.)

In the examples below, the same image (156px by 156px) has been either 'embedded' or 'embedded as thumbnail'. Try reducing the size of your window – you'll see that the first image expands to fill the width of your screen (and becomes pixellated because it was a small image not intended to be displayed so large).

In the following examples, the original image in the media item is 818px by 496px.

Note: You can't embed a thumbnail and have the caption display.

Embedded as thumbnail 100 x 100px

Embedded as thumbnail 220 x 220px

Embedded as thumbnail 480 x 480px

How tall images behave on the front-end

This is what happens when you have an image that is 818px wide but a variety of different heights. This demonstrates that landscape images over 500px high will not be displayed at full width.

800 x 200