WordPress Plugins A-Z #297 Flip Books, Tax Reports

 I have a couple of bits of podcast advice for you. Take it for what it's worth.

First, I noticed that someone suggested tweaking the equalizer settings to make one of you sound less muddled. For me, that's a lower priority than making sure you two are at the same volume level. A number of times, the levels are so different that if I can hear one of you, the other is hard to hear or is blasting me out. What I've found incredible for this is Auphonic.com. It is both a website where you can upload audio and have it perform processing on it, or a desktop application that does the same thing. The website allows you to process 2 hours of audio per month for free. The desktop app is $99, one time. It is a brilliant bit of software that can do processing such as leveling out the volume, reducing noise and hum, and setting a particular loudness target. While the leveler makes your volumes the same, the loudness target give the audio a specific perceived loudness. Many podcasters are trying to gets producers to standardize on “-16 LUFS” so that from one podcast to the next, the perceived volume is the same. Great product, and as I said, you can use it for free 2 hours a month. Give it a look. https://auphonic.com

The second suggesting is about the donation issue that seems to keep coming up. My philosophy on this was influenced by Cliff Ravenscraft (“The Podcast Answerman”). You can hear his ideas on Pat Flynn's podcdast when he interviewed Cliff back in 2011. https://www.smartpassiveincome.com/podcasts/is-giving-away-free-information-bad/

Basically, his philosophy is that he gives away his podcast content for free in order to create a following and to establish himself as an expert, which translates into sales for his consulting business and his products. The podcast will even sometimes include promos for his upcoming classes, but otherwise his +/- 1 hour show is valuable information for his listeners.

And I think you may already be beneficiaries of this idea. I don't know where your business comes from, but whereas you used to advertise your services on the show, you now have so much work you don't do that anymore. Is it possible that you are getting value back, and much more than the value you provide? Again, I can't know the answer to that, but I have a feeling that it could very well be true to some extent. You have established yourselves as experts in the field, and I really believe that some of your business success is due to your podcast.

Anyway, just my thoughts. Feel free to take them or leave them. All I would say is keep up the good work and thanks for your plug-in reviews.

Doug Payton

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Hello John and Marcus,

I love your show, thank you for all you do! I wonder if you could talk a little bit about managing the media library. I know it's a huge topic, but here's my situation, maybe you could use it as an example of what pickle we can get ourselves into when we don't know what we're doing at first.

My self-hosted WP site has a huge media library: 1600+ photos for 140 posts. http://joinusinfrance.com

Problem #1: many of those photos are over 500k because they are both too large in pixels (some 1600x which makes no sense to me now!) and I didn't use TinyPNG for 2 out of the 3 years I've had the site.

Problem #2: I am not certain all of those photos are legal to use. I know how to find legal photos now (Unsplash and Pixabay as well as my own photos), but I didn't 3 years ago when I started. I'd be happier starting over with photos I am sure are legal.

Problem #3: Some of my posts have a dozen or more photos in them, which is unnecessary and really slows things down to a crawl. I can just delete photos from the posts, but will it be enough?

I would love to “start over” with a leaner and cleaner media library, but I'm not sure what is the best way to go about that.

Question 1: If I remove the photos from the posts they'll still be in the media library. To speed up my site, is it important to remove the photos from both the posts and the media library, or is it enough to remove the photo from the posts?

Question 2: Is there a plugin that will help me remove photos from the posts AND the media library at the same time? I searched for one but couldn't find anything like that.

Question 3: I saw the “unattached” filter in the media library, but I know for a fact that some of those photos are used on the site, so I don't understand what “unattached” means. Can you clarify?

Question 4: When I insert a photo into my post, I have the option to insert it as full size, medium or thumbnail. Leaving aesthetic questions aside, will my post load faster if I choose thumbnail rather than full size?

Question 5: Can I create a completely separate media library for the same site where I'd only add photos that meet my new criteria and use those photos instead of the ones from the old media library? If I did that, eventually I could delete the older media library and solve all my problems all at once.

Thank you so much, I really appreciate your help! Maybe I should hire somebody to do this for me, but I am a firm believer in learning how to do things myself so I don't repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

Best,

Annie