If you’ve just started using Windows Live Writer as your blogging client of choice, you may notice that it has some interesting presets for how to handle images you want posted in your blog. For instance, let’s say your blog has a a template so that images should be 580 pixels wide. That’s how they look best (and don’t get cropped by the blog’s column width), so you take the images you want to post, and carefully resize them in an image editing program, like The GIMP.
Once you’ve done this, you use the Windows Live Writer Insert Image button to add your image to your blog post, only… your image is now different! Instead of displaying its exactly-correct 580 pixels width, it’s now… quite a bit smaller, left-aligned and with a drop-shadow!
It also has a drop shadow. And even if you’d previously set your paragraph text to be centered, you’ll find that the image is now left justified. This is all fixable, but if you look through the Windows Live Writer preferences, you won’t find any image settings, unfortunately.
However, this is one of those instances where the solution happens to be hiding in plain sight. Part of this is that you don’t actually see any image settings on the toolbar ribbon until you’ve used the Insert Picture feature to add an image to your post or have highlighted an image you’ve already inserted. So to change our settings, go ahead and add an image.
Note: if you already have an image in your blog post, you could avoid adding another one and highlight an existing one instead.
Once you’ve added an image or selected one, you’ll notice the ribbon has changed to now show Picture Tools.
Here, finally, we can modify how Windows Live Writer treats pictures. First, click the Size button on the left side of the ribbon. A little pop-up will appear where you can change how Windows Live Writer resizes your images by default (or simply leaves them alone).
If you want to resize your own images in a separate program, choose the Original option as shown above. However, if you have uses for Small, Medium, and Large settings, you can choose one, or if you have a use for those settings, but the default settings aren’t quite the sizes you want, click the Set default sizes option (as shown in the image above), to change those default sizes.
When you’re satisfied with the Size options, click the Picture Borders button to choose what – if any – border will be placed around your image.
By default, Windows Live Writer uses a drop shadow, but you can set it to no border, or one of the other options, such as rounded corners, thick black border, or even rounded corners.
When this setting has been configured, click to change what kind of alignment your image has.
You can choose to place your image inline (text flows around it), left justified, centered, or right justified.
By default, these are the only three things Windows Live Writer changes about an image when you upload it, its size, border and alignment. However, If you want to keep going, there are a couple other optional settings you can choose to have it change.
First is the Rotation of your image.
You can choose to rotate your image 90 degrees to the left or right, or to have it tilted askew. Finally, you can adjust the margins around your image.
This is nice if you want a bit of space above and below your image, or to switch how close text will flow around it if placed inline.
Once you’ve selected all the settings you want, click the Set To Default button.
You won’t receive any feedback that any changes have been made (not even a “Your Settings Have Been Saved” window or dialog), but the next time you insert an image into a blog post, your settings will be used, and not the default ones. And that’s about it! As mentioned, these settings aren’t hard to change, and they’re actually right out in the open. But since they’re not mentioned at all in the Windows Live Writer Options, and are only discoverable when inserting an image, hopefully this how-to tutorial will be helpful.