Audio and Video Formats

Learn how to make gallery, video, audio, and other post types pop with post formats.

To this:

That’s the same blog with the same content — the only difference is post formats!

If your theme supports them, you’ll find a “Post Format” module in the left-hand column of your post editor — it’ll look like this:

Some themes will offer all nine formats, and others have fewer. Pick a format, add content to the post the way you normally so, and publish! Depending on your theme, you’ll see some stylistic differences between this post and your posts with the default Standard format.

If you start a new post containing a gallery, video, audio track, or quote, your theme may automatically apply the related post format. You can always choose “Standard if you’d prefer the default layout.

What do post formats look like?

The appearance of post formats varies based on your theme. Here’s how an Image post appears in a number of themes (click to enlarge):

Ryu shows the image above the post title (as opposed to below it) and chooses a background color that highlights the image. Flounder adds a bright green background and an image icon. Sorbet also adds an icon – pastel-colored – and Spun keeps all decoration at a minimum to focus on the image itself.

There’s quite a bit of variety in the way themes employ post formats. If you want to preview how a certain theme will handle formats before switching to it, you can check out the theme’s Live Demo from the Theme Showcase.

Understanding post formats

You can put any kind of content you’d normally publish in a post in any of the post formats, but they were designed with particular kinds of content in mind:

• Standard is the default post format, your everyday blog post. You can also add video, images, galleries, and whatever else you would like to a regular Text post.
• Photo is intended for single image posts — a quick snap of lunch or your cat.
• Video is for, well, videos.
• Quote highlights your blockquoted text in a bolder way than standard posts typically do.
• Link is for those days when you just want to share a link to a fantastic article you read.
• Aside for brief snippets of text that aren’t quite whole blog posts, such as quick thoughts and anecdotes.
• Gallery for (you guessed it) galleries.
• Status for a quick update about what you are doing right now.
• Audio for your favorite tunes or podcasts.
• Chat to highlight memorable conversations you have with friends, both on- and offline.

What if you love the look of your theme’s Video post format, but you want to use it to highlight a gallery? Go for it! There are no rules here, only guidelines.

Editing post formats

Let’s say you create your Image post, and then you decide that you wanted to make that particular post a Gallery. How do you change its post format? Simple — open the post editor by going to My Site(s) → Posts and clicking “edit” under the post you’d like to change. On the post editing screen, select a different format from the Post Formats module, then click Update to update the post.

Here’s that module again:

If you don’t see the Post Format module, then you are likely using a theme that does not use post formats.