Adding a Gallery to your Self-hosted WordPress Website – part 1

Adding a gallery to a self-hosted WordPress website isn’t a complex topic, but there are tips which if used, will increase the effectiveness of the gallery.

This guide is split into two and looks at a popular WordPress gallery plugin, plus provides you with useful tips.

If you require a WordPress developer or designer, please hire Neogain.

The WordPress gallery plugin.

A popular WordPress gallery plugin is the NextGEN Gallery.

The gallery plugin has been around for a while.

It is an extremely feature rich plugin that continues to impress and is highly configurable.

By default it will create a thumbnail gallery and when you select an image, the image will be displayed in a ‘lightbox’ window i.e. shaded background with the image in a white rectangle / square.

How to upload your images.

There are a few different ways to create galleries using NextGEN Gallery, one of which is to present it with a zip archive containing your images.

However before you select your images, make sure you read our advice in part 2 of the guide.

Once the NextGEN Gallery is installed you can:

1. Log into your WordPress Administrator dashboard.

2. From the left-hand menu options, select ‘Add Gallery / Images’ from the ‘Gallery’ menu.

3. Select ‘Upload a Zip-File’, then select your zip file containing the images and upload.

Even once the file is uploaded, do not leave the web page until it has finished creating the gallery.

How to place the gallery into your page or post.

The NextGEN Gallery plugin makes placing a gallery into your page a breeze.

Once you’ve imported your gallery, all you need to do is find its ID (number) and then paste that ID along with a code (tag), calling the gallery.

Example:

1. Log into your WordPress dashboard as an administrator.

2. Select ‘Manage Gallery’ from the ‘Gallery’ menu to show a list of your galleries, including the ID of each gallery.

3. Then within your post you place, with 19 in this example being the gallery ID.

When you publish your page or post, you will discover your gallery thumbnails are displayed where you placed the gallery code.

To be continued….

There is no point chucking a bundle of images into a zip file and uploading, then only to find nobody really cares, struggles to view the images or leaves your website directly afterwards.

Please read part two of our adding a gallery to a WordPress blog guide which provides some useful advice and insight to help you get going.

If you require a WordPress designer, please get in touch.