The media Library is a repository of media elements you will use when creating pages, posts or other pieces of your Wordpress site.  You can add elements to it on the fly when trying to insert media in other places in wordpress (see the line above the editor “Upload/Insert followed by a few icons).

You can also add elements at will using the links from the main menu.  See “Media”/”Library”/”Add New” in the screen shot below.

When “library” is selected the following list view of the previously loaded media elements comes up.  Note the filter and bulk action options at the top of the screen, as well as the search.

Editing media elements is shown in the screen shot below.  Note the ability to add both a caption and  a description.  The caption can be used when the image cannot be displayed and its also good for search engine indexing purposes.

Using media library content is simple and as stated above you can also upload content at the same time as when you go to retrieve media content.

There are two different uploaders. For fast connection the default uploader, the Flash Uploader, is the better choice.  For slower more problematic connections use the Browser Uploader.  The flash uploader does multiple files at once and then processes them individually.

Wordpress allows amazing integration between different plugins and the media library.  As an example, we use the “Bits on the run” video system plugin.  Once we activated the plugin, it was automatically added to the media section.