Gregg H. Hawkins

The other day I was looking around for information about how to create a photo gallery in WordPress. I don’t know about you guys, but most of the time I end up finding installation instructions and information that is either useless or I have no clue what they’re talking about. A lot of the time it seems like that authors of tutorials on “how to” do something assume that the readers are knowledgeable in the field, which most of us aren’t! Hopefully these instructions on how to add a sleek looking photo gallery to your blog, hosted on WordPress, will be as easy to follow as were my instructions on how to create a rotating banner ad.

How to Create a Photo Gallery in WordPress
At first it may seem a little intimidating, but trust me, it’s quite easy. It’s just like the rotating banner ad, if I can do it and figure it out, you should be able to figure it out as well. To create a photo gallery in WordPress we will be using Ruben Boelinger’s plugin called the NextGen Gallery.

Note: Before installing the plugin you’ll need to understand that there’s a different between “gallery” and “album.” When you create an album it will contain the “gallery” of pictures that you showcase. This will come into handy when you use the [album=ID,extend] or [album=ID,compact] and [gallery=ID] commands.

Steps to Install the NextGen Gallery Plugin

1. Download the NextGen Gallery plugin (nggallery zip download) and install the files to your wp-content/plugins/nggallery folder. The zip file will give you a folder named nextgen-gallery with all of the files, but don’t worry. Just rename the folder to nggallery and place it into your plugins folder.
   
   
2. Download the JW Image Rotator plugin. But wait! Once you’ve downloaded the JW Image Rotator plugin you’ll only need the imagerotator.swf file. Place that file into your nggallery folder that you installed into your plugins directory in step 1.
   
   
3. Now you can activate the NextGen Gallery Widget and NextGen Gallery in your WordPress account.
   
   
4. Now, create a page to display your album. Go to Manage>>Pages>>Create New Page and name it whatever you desire. Add the code [album=ID,extend] into the content area. ID refers to the album number that the plugin assigns to each album. You can go ahead and replace ID with the number 1. Click publish.
   
   
5. Now, create a page to display your galleries. Go to Manage>>Pages>>Create New Page and give it a title. Add the code [gallery=ID] into the content area. Just like the albums, the plugin will assign an ID to the galleries you add. Since you haven’t added any galleries you can replace ID with the number 1. Click publish.Note: A page can display however many albums you want and or however many pictures you want. You can display a single photo or many photos (a gallery).
   
   
6. Create a gallery by going to Gallery>>Add Gallery. For me, I placed photos in wp-content/gallery/my folder name. My folder name contained the pictures I wish to appear within the gallery. Since I already uploaded photos to my FTP I went to Gallery>>Add Gallery and then clicked import image folder. I entered wp-content/gallery/my folder name into the box and clicked the “Import Folder” button.
   
   
7. Go to Gallery>>Manage Gallery and now you can add a title to your photos, a description, and alt tags. You can also choose which picture you desire to show up as the thumbnail for your album.
   
   
8. To showcase your gallery you’ll need to create an album. Go to Gallery>>Album and add a new album. Once you add a new album select your album name from the drop down menu. You should see the picture gallery you created earlier on the right. You can now drag that into the album area on the left. You will also be able to see the album ID.
   
   
9. Make sure that your [album=ID,extend] correlates with your album ID in step 8 and make sure that your [gallery=ID] correlates with your gallery ID that you created in step 6.

I followed the instructions from Ruben Boelinger’s website. I also followed the English version of instructions which can be found here. I removed the album and gallery I created because I didn’t want to use up a lot of bandwidth. I may add one in the near future, though. If you have any questions please feel free to ask through a comment or you can contact me via my contact form.

P.S. Here’s a quick tip (I learned a while back) for those of you editing your pictures in Adobe Photoshop. Save your image, I usually save mine as .jpg (jpeg). Open your image back up with Photoshop and hold down ctrl+alt+shift and press the letter s at the same time. This allows you to save your image “for the web” and gets rid of a lot of information Photoshop puts into your image file, which makes it larger. You can go around 50-60% of the quality and it still looks fine while reducing the image size in half.