Photo Galleries are important part of blogs and are used to show off personal photographs (on a personal blog) or photographs of various events if you have a niche blog or you could use it to describe some place or anything which could be useful to you. There are various ways of showing the images as photo gallery in WordPress and I would list most of them over here.
WordPress media gallery : Prior to WordPress 2.5 everyone had to depend on various plugins, however now it’s possible to have WordPress gallery as it’s part of the WordPress 2.5 release. In order to integrate the gallery you should follow these simple steps -
- In the dashboard go to Write.
- Click on Image icon next to Add Media (Just below the Title text box).
- Browse the image which you want to upload and click on the upload button.
- Click on insert button to insert the photo gallery.
This will integrate the photo gallery in the blog posts and just use your imagination to make full use of this. However, WordPress gallery feature is quite limited in features and there are various plugins which are far advanced than WordPress gallery feature and let’s have a look at those plugins -
1. NextGEN Gallery : This plugin is a CMS in itself. NextGen Gallery Plugin is a feature rich plugin and is often compared to photo gallery CMS’ like Coppermine photo gallery, Gallery, Plogger etc. The plugin allows you to upload the zip files and extracts itself to create new albums and thus saves a lot of time. It’s so advanced that it’s quite difficult to explain all the features of it. Here’s the list of features :
- Sortable Albums : Create your own sets of image
- Upload a Zip-File with pictures : Upload pictures in a zip-file (Not in Safe-mode)
- Watermark function : You can add a watermark image or text
- JavaScript Effect : Use any available popular image effect : Thickbox, Lightbox or Highslide
- Multiple CSS Stylesheet : Use a nice shadow effect for your thumbnails with your own CSS file
- Slideshow : Full integrated flash slideshow
- TinyMCE : Button integration for easy adding the gallery tags
- Sidebar Widget : Show a slideshow, random or recent picture at your sidebar
- Language support : Translated in more than 15 languages
- Upload tab integration : You have access to all pictures via the upload tab
- Tag support for images : Append related images to your post
- Meta data support : Import EXIF, IPTC or XMP meta data
- Sort images feature
2. PhotoXhibit : This is another kick-ass image gallery plugin and helps in you in displaying the images in some of the best ways. It allows you to display images from your Flickr, Picasa & SmugMug accounts too. You can easily change the appearance of the gallery with the in built style editor.
Inserting Flickr images as gallery -
There are number of plugins which allow you to insert images from Flickr, PhotoXhibit (the one we mentioned above is one of them). However, I prefer one more plugin when it comes to playing around with Flickr images in WordPress. The plugin is called WordPress Flickr Manager and it’s been provided for free by Trent Gardner. It’s an amazing plugin and displays the images with some cool ajax effects too.
I leave it up to you that which plugin will you prefer, however, if you’ll ask my choice of plugin then it would be NextGEN Gallery plugin for sure.
Thank you very much for this extremely useful article. I’ll be coming back often for help and advice about how to best incorporate photos into my wordpress blog.
This was the most helpful info I’ve found yet!
Light and blessings,
Buff
This gives make the most of an awesome website respectable Gives many thanks for the efforts to assist people