WordPress Stock Images Without Jetpack

As I’ve mentioned a few times before, I’ve recently found myself back in the realm of managing some WordPress sites. One of the first things I typically do for a WordPress site is link it up with Jetpack for things like CDN, minification of CSS and JavaScript, etc. Overall, it does a great job of making things on a WordPress site much slimmer and faster. It also provides some good analytics without being as horribly invasive as things like Google Analytics. I personally love the idea of things like Plausible but don’t really want to pay for smaller sites.

As I’m now, for the first time, managing a WordPress site for someone else, however, I’m slowly running into new scenarios to troubleshoot. This evening my SO, for whom I created my first WordPress site in a couple of years, was attempting to create her first ever blog post. Almost immediately she wanted to add some stock images to her site and had no immediate options for it. I was initially confused because when I try to add an image to her site, I see the following:

Along with the option to upload a new image, I get a Select Image option where I can either pick something that already exists in my media library or find something from Pexels or Openverse. The latter two are nice since they’re stock images that are free to use without worrying about licensing. Whenever my SO was using the same block, however, she didn’t see the Select Image option. Her UI directly showed Media Library instead. I tested things like her role on the site, but that didn’t make a difference.

After some digging, I finally uncovered that these options aren’t a part of WordPress, nor do they come automatically as a part of using EasyWP for my hosting. Instead, it stems from the fact that my account is being used to link the site with Jetpack, and Jetpack is providing the stock image integration. My SO could get the same options if her account was also linked to Jetpack, but that seems overkill to me; I didn’t want to make her go through the process of signing up on WordPress.com and then linking that to the account on her own site. In fact, while I was trying to troubleshoot the issue, she managed to find a stock photo somewhere else that she was able to use for her post, so while having something built into the post editor would be nice, it wasn’t a must-have for her.

After a quick search of available WordPress plugins, I found Instant Images.

It aggregates content from several different stock image services, including Pexels, Opeverse, and others. Unfortunately, the images can’t be accessed directly from the post editor. Instead, a new menu gets added to the WordPress Media menu:

Selecting Instant Images opens up a new screen to search for any keywords you happen to need:

Once you find something you like you can simply click on it to add it to your site’s media library. You can then insert it into any posts or pages on your site by selecting from content you’ve already uploaded. While it’s not quite as intuitive as being able to add content directly while creating a post or page, the nice part is that the images are added to your site’s media library… meaning that if the original image is removed from the source site for whatever reason, it remains on your site; you don’t have to worry about remote content disappearing, changing, etc.

It would be easy to debate if this is a better solution than simply having every account managing a site be a part of Jetpack for a slightly more intuitive experience when creating content, but if you want to keep roles clearly delineated and have all content managed centrally, then I think this plugin is one that’s fairly worthwhile.