confusing access to images

Newbie here. I’m wanting to use wordpress as a site builder rather than a forum, to rebuild an existing site I never completed anyway. So this webspace, at http://elfintechnologies.com, already had some folders I kept for things like images, logos, and product photos. I left them there figuring it would be easier to access them for importing into new wordpress pages if they were already there in the same domain, somewhere off the root. But that really hasn’t been the case and I’m not sure I understand why.

I used the theme called “Displace” to create the test page you see there now as my default page. But in order to get images from my existing folders outside of the wp-content folder that wordpress provides, I would have to click “Add Media” from the editor, and then choose “Insert media from URL, and then manually construct an entire URL string to get to a single image I wanted, one at a time. So I tried to circumvent this by importing a few images right from my computer, looking at where WP put them (turned out to be /wp-content-uploads/2013/12 ). Then I just used ordinary FTP browser to dump a bunch more images into that folder, thinking I’d then be able to just grab them from thumbnails the image browser provided. No luck.

Obviously I’m a shooting myself in the foot here. Since I bypassed the proper IMPORT stage with those images, naturally there are no thumbnails available to simply grab those images from next time. My bad for trying to get around the system, but still… whats the right way? Obviously the page editor makes it easy to import a lot of images at once from my computer, but it seems there ought to be an equally simple way to import multiple images into the wp-content area directly from another folder within the same domain?