Today Im doing a review of a new WordPress plugin called FotoPress

Anyone who has a blog or WordPress website knows that one thing you will for sure need is images. Posts without images are boring, they look overly long, and they don’t keep the users attention. People are visual creatures and you for sure should have some visuals for them to look at on all your blog posts or website pages.

The problem is that WordPress has very limited image functionality. You can upload an image but beyond that there is little more you can do. You cant edit an image, you cant add text or crop it. Even worse you need to actually have an image in the first place.

Unless you have a huge library of images just sitting on your hard drive what you will find yourself doing when you need one is something similar to this. You head over to Google and start searching for an image in the image search tab. Then you look through all of the search results trying to find one that both looks good, and that is not water marked or copyrighted. Once you finally find one you download it to your computer. Then you use an image editor to resize it, crop it, add any effects or text and save again. Finally when all that is done you can upload it to WordPress and use it in your post.

FotoPress aims to solve these problems my making this entire process happen quickly, and right inside of WordPress itself. To start off with it adds a special FotoPress button inside of the WordPress WYSIWYG editor.

Clicking that button will then give you the option to pull images from your computer, from your Youzign account if your a Youzign user or to search for images. Of these three options the most useful for many people is going to be the image search functionality.

You can search for images on Pixabay, Flickr, Open Clip Art, or Instagram.  You can also tell the search to only find images that do not require attribution (credit to the author) and that are licensed as free to modify if you like. In my testing, searching Pixabay only the plugin found 500 results for my search in about a second or two.

Once you select the image you want you can then insert it into your post as it is, or you can edit it. I think most people are going to want to edit it. At the very least your going to want to resize the image and possibly crop it. Fortunately FotoPress is not just an image search tool. Its also an image editor.

Besides being able to crop and resize you can also add PhotoShop like effects, text, other images, shapes or free hand drawings to your image.

On thing I did notice that I didn’t like was the user interface when you are  resizing. You have two options, you can use a slider or you can enter the size you want in an input field. Both of these options had issues though.

With the slider it will show fractional sizes. For example in one of my tests I used the slider to resize the image and at one point it showed 700.8 pixels wide. Well there is no such thing as 8/10ths of a pixel. There should have been automatic rounding on the display. This is a basic oversight that I was surprised to see them miss.

With the input field you can enter the size you want manually. However there was no sanitation. The system expects you to enter numbers but it allows you to enter letters as well. For example I entered “650Brett” as the width in a test. This is obviously not correct. The plugin should have sanitization that prevents people from entering letters in a input field that expects numbers only.

Both of these things are very basic errors on the developers part and while neither of them breaks the plugin I personally think they where kind of amateurish mistakes. These things are the reason I rated FotoPress 3 stars for execution as opposed to the 4 starts it probably should have gotten.

Despite these errors though I found FotoPress to be a solid software, that makes the process of finding, editing, and adding an image to your blog posts or WordPress pages a lot more easy. It just makes sense to have this functionality right inside of WordPress.

While FotoPress is not some hype get rich product it is in fact a good software. A good software is a practical tool that makes your life easier. Thats what FotoPress does, it saves you time, and makes a task that you would normally be a pain to do much easier.

UPDATE: The product vendor has read my review, and informed me that based on my feedback he has fixed the GUI issues I described in it!

 A quick note about the reviews I do on this site. The product vendors give me access to their products for free in order for me to do my review. However I make no promises to them regarding the results of my tests or what I will write in my review. Should you click a link that takes you to a sales page for a paid product for sale this link will be an affiliate link and I will be paid a percentage of the sales price should you decide to invest in it.

About the Author

Brett Rutecky

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Brett Rutecky is a full time online marketer, web developer, and entrepreneur. He has developed scores of Facebook apps, dozens of custom web sites and hundreds of scripts.

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