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In this tutorial, we will talk about ways of managing media files when you’re running a bunch of WordPress websites within a single WordPress multisite network. By the way, if you’re not 100% sure what a multisite network is, then you’re probably running multiple standalone sites.

Long story short, I will show you how the media files in multisite networks are handled by WordPress, how to set up centralized media management across your network, and also how to organize media with folders.

When you manage multiple WordPress sites, and these sites have some shared content, you may be wondering if there is a way to prevent duplicating the same media files.

I mean, why copy an image from “Site 1” to “Site 2” when we can use it on “Site 2” by its direct URL from “Site 1”?

In this article, I am going to uncover different scenarios and how we can achieve the goal of having a centralized media library across WordPress sites, for example, when your sites are a part of a WP Multisite network, or when you’re using standalone sites.

Needless to say, all the methods described here work great for WooCommerce stores.

Since I work with WordPress Multisite a lot, I’ve already had a chance to implement a similar functionality of copying media between sites in some of my plugins. Below, in this guide, I am going to share different ways of how you can do it, too.

The whole tutorial consists of two parts:

• In the first part, I’ll share with you how you can manage media files across your entire WordPress multisite network with the help of plugins.
• In the second part, you will learn how you can copy a media file from one site to another with the help of bulk actions. We are going to create one from scratch. So, it is going to be a programmatic approach. This part is for those who would like to create a solution themselves or to learn how it is actually working under the hood.

What if you’re not using a WordPress Multisite or simply not sure what it is? In each chapter of this tutorial, I will also show you a way of doing a similar thing for standalone sites (not a part of the WordPress Multisite network).

In this tutorial, I want to dive deep into the functionality of WordPress responsive images, which appeared in the 4.4 version of the core. If you ever wondered how this functionality works, then this tutorial is probably what you need.

In this step-by-step tutorial, I will guide you on how to create media library folders for your WordPress website. I will show you how to do it with my plugin, and we will also do it without using any plugins.

The whole idea of publishing this guide came to me because of the questions from clients who are using my shared media library plugin for WordPress Multisite. Specifically, they were asking whether or not it supports third-party plugins for media library folders. The thing is that there are no official WordPress plugins for creating media library folders. In other cases, of course, I would have added their support in the multisite shared media library.

Oh, and this is how the folders are going to look:

Ok, now let’s jump into it.