I have made the move from Blogger.com to WordPress as a platform for all my blogging needs for a little more then a year. Coming form a Blogger.com background, I’ve since noticed some peculiarities in the WordPress world that never even cross my mind during the days with Blogger.com. One of the most annoying is the lack of or poor support for in-post photos in themes. To begin with, WordPress developers have never given much thought about how to make it easy for bloggers to place photos in posts but theme designers usually just totally ignore the possibilities of photos in posts.

I mean, it is one thing to have the style in the style.css, even though requires bloggers to manually apply the class to image tags, but it is another to give little or no consideration to photos layout and style within a given theme. I frequently tryout themes and I have yet to really come across one that have photos styling sorted. Immediately after applying the theme to my mock blog, I notice photo layout in my mock post will be off and there is no class in the CSS to apply to the image tag to fix the layout problem.

In addition, the rest of the theme’s layout usually never caters for photos that are layout with float. If I add a class to float images to the left or right, it most definitely breaks the theme layout. Although only apparent in short post with images taller then the wrapped text. More likely than not these tall images will extend beyond the post metadata area disrupting the post metadata layout. Images that are tall enough will even extend beyond the next post title.

Of course, I hear you protest that theme writers are usually very generous to give their hard work out for free and that I should be more grateful to their effort. Don’t get me wrong. This post is never intended to slam theme designers and I am really grateful for their work. I’m just hoping that some theme developers may come across this post and perhaps notice missing layout style in their design. Besides, I do feel that most theme developers do what they do to build up a portfolio plus it is a very good way to build links, traffic and attention to their site or blog. An over sight like leaving out style for photos does taint their effort in my opinion.

How many themes have you come across that not only have support styling and layout for photos in the CSS but also to have the styling of photos matches the theme?