Nowadays, if you want an image in your post or page — and who doesn’t! — you can paste image data from the clipboard directly into the editor.
This is handy, but there’s one drawback; when you save the post, the image is still stored as a file in your media library, so it has to have a filename. WordPress has no idea what’s in the image, so it makes up a name that’s just a random string like “E23C9F3F-2DA4-45DC-B6D1-CD8536F2C93B-e1635452193657.png”. This is bad for a couple reasons — when you look at the media library, you probably want to see meaningful names rather than random garbage. Search engines indexing your site also want the image URL to contain some words so it can match the image to search terms.
The Paste by Jörn Lund addresses that problem. When using this plugin, you don’t paste directly into the page or post. Instead, ask to insert an image and open the media library dialog. The plugin adds a new “Copy & Paste” tab to the dialog. Paste the image there, set the filename (and filetype; PNG or JPG), and click Upload.
Afterward, you can use the Edit function from the Media Library to crop and scale the image (in this example, I cropped out the text on the left to leave just the icon image, which I used at the top of this post.
This is almost the easiest way I can imagine to make this work. It would be great if pasting an image into the body of the post just automatically asked you for the filename and other details (Alt text etc). Maybe someday! Meanwhile, this is pretty damn good, and is the latest entry in my Essential Plugins category.
Notes: However you’re getting your images into the post, also consider these important image-related plugins:
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