Images and files

Every image and file used anywhere on your website lives in one place: the Media library, under Content in the left-hand menu.

Upload once, use anywhere. The same image can appear on a page, in a news article and in an event without uploading it again.

Uploading

Open Media.
Click Create New.
Drag your file in, or click to browse for it.
Fill in Alt text (see below — please don't skip this).
Save.

You can also upload directly from a page while you're building it. Any image added that way is still added to Media, so it's available everywhere afterwards.

Alt text

Alt text describes the image for someone who can't see it — most often a member using a screen reader. Search engines read it too.

The field is optional, so nothing stops you saving without it. Fill it in anyway.

Write what the image shows, in a few plain words:

Good: Members networking at the 2026 awards dinner
Poor: image1, photo, DSC_0043.jpg
Unnecessary: Picture of... — screen readers already announce it as an image

If an image is purely decorative and carries no information, leave the field empty rather than inventing a description.

Sizes are handled for you

You don't need to resize anything before uploading. On upload the CMS automatically generates a range of sizes, and the website picks the right one for each place the image appears and for the visitor's screen.

Upload the largest good-quality version you have. The CMS can make an image smaller; it cannot invent detail that wasn't there. A small image stretched into a wide banner looks soft and there is no way to fix that except re-uploading a bigger file.

Very large files are still worth a moment's thought — a 12MB photo straight off a camera takes longer to upload and to process than the same picture saved at a sensible quality.

The focal point

Because one image gets used at several shapes, the CMS sometimes has to crop it. The focal point tells it what to keep.

Open an image and drag the focal point marker onto the part that matters — usually a face, or the subject of the photo. Wide crops will then keep that area in frame instead of centring blindly and cutting someone's head off.

Worth setting on any photo of people.

Replacing a file

To update an image that's already used around the site, edit the existing Media item and replace the file rather than uploading a new one. Everywhere that uses it picks up the new version.

If you upload a new item instead, you have to find and re-point every page that used the old one.

Deleting — read this first

Deleting from Media is not role-protected. Anyone who can sign in to the CMS can delete a file, whatever their role. There is no undo.

A deleted image disappears from every page that was using it. The CMS does not warn you, and the pages will not tell you they're now missing an image — they simply render without it.

Before deleting anything:

Ask whether you actually need it gone, or whether it's just untidy. An unused image costs nothing.
If you're replacing something, use replace the file above instead of delete-then-upload.
If you're sure, search the site for the image first to check nothing still uses it.

The safe habit: replace, don't delete.

Finding things later

The Media list shows the filename and alt text. That makes the filename worth caring about at upload time — board-photo-2026.jpg is findable in two years, IMG_4471.jpg is not.

Rename the file on your computer before uploading. It's much quicker than renaming it later.

Documents and PDFs

Newsletters, forms, minutes and reports are not images and mostly don't belong in Media. If your site has a Documents collection, put them there — it's built for files members download, and it keeps them out of the image library.

Pages and the page builder
Getting started