Last week when I wrote about uploading more than the obvious: images, audios, videos in WordPress, Carrie asked me a great question in return. Is there a way to shorten those URLs? Well… the good news is, yes and it does not need a plugin. The bad news is, it means changing some settings and folders which means work and redirects. But there is another good news to the end of it, you’ll probably only have to do it once… provided you don’t change your mind again 🙂 So how do you do it?

Option 1 – Change the way WordPress organizes your uploads

In Settings >> Miscellaneous, you have the option of organizing your uploads based on the update month and year. This adds two more sub-folders to the URL (see the folders in red) making it

http://site.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/filename.ext

If you uncheck this box then all uploads will be dumped into the uploads folder. Which makes the URLs shorter (see the sample below) but on the other hand your uploads folder is going to be pretty messy after a while. I personally have no problems with this, but I hope in the future WordPress will allow me the option to upload to a sub-folder of my choice.

http://site.com/wp-content/uploads/filename.ext

Option 2 – Change your uploads folder

You don’t have to store all your uploads in /wp-content/uploads you know. You can change it to something much more fun and short.  If you do both option 1 and 2, you can cut out one sub-folder to make your media file URLs as short as http://site.com/m/filename.ext (depending where you installed your WordPress files)

You’d change this in Settings >> Miscellaneous, change “store uploads in this folder” and “Full URL path to files”

They won’t make your media URLs super short but they are an improvement. This post has also spurned some ideas. I’ll have to check out their viability before revealing the ideas. If I come up with something good, you know you’ll hear about it right here.