How to resize and and publish images (or other rich content such as video) to a WordPress blog in one step using Windows Live Writer

Summary: Windows Live Writer is a marvelous tool for creating rich content on WordPress offline.   It is much more powerful than the built-in web-based WordPress editor and is particularly useful when publishing text with a lot of images or video.  With Live Writer, you create your content offline and publish it using WordPress’s built-in XML-RPC protocol (this must be enabled for your blog – see your Settings menu). This articles discusses how this can be done, step-by-step,and the advantages.

The usual way to publish text and images to WordPress is this:

1. Capture or save the source image to your hard-drive
2. Open it using an image editor (I like the free Paint.Net.  Picasa is also good)
3. Save the resized image to your hard drive
4. Insert the image in the web-based WordPress editor

This is a lot of keystrokes and a lot of navigating Windows file directories.  Using Windows Live Writer, you can short-cut two of the above steps.  All you need to do:

1. Copy the image from any web or disk location (from your web browser, just right-click > Copy over the image); or else capture it from your display with Alt-PrintScreen (or else use the screen capture function of the free Microsoft HTML Help Image Editor).
2. Paste into Live Writer.  You can resize, hyperlink or apply effects (shadow-borders for example) to the image directly
3. Publish your post.  Live Writer will connect to your host and publish the image automatically to your wpcontent/uploads directory

You can also use this technique to generate video emails from WordPres.  Use Feedblitz or Feedburner as your newsletter system (mailing list management).  Then just publish a post with a video.  Voila.

Note: Windows Live Writer only works on Posts (not on Pages).  If you are creating a Wordpress Page (static page), just cut-and-paste the generated html from the Post into the Page, then delete the Post.