June 21, 2011 – WordPress Gallery Plug-ins

There are many image gallery plug-ins for WordPress which provide a way of showing images in galleries and albums and use the version of the ‘lightbox’ overlay.

NextGen Gallery by Alex Rabe –

Download the NextGen Gallery plug in.
(The current version needs PHP 5.2 to run)

http://alexrabe.de/wordpress-plugins/nextgen-gallery/
Older versions can be downloaded which run on older versions of PHP:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/nextgen-gallery/download/

Once downloaded, and uploaded into the plugins folder, go to your site’s admin/plugins page to activate. It will add a set of pages links on the lower left of WordPress admin area. The options include:

Overview: Lists number of images, galleries and albums. ALSO lists the server settings, so you can see what your host is running.

Add Gallery / Images: where you can set a Gallery, and upload the images. Images can be uploaded individually, or you can select multiples and upload all. Choose the required gallery. Images can also be uploaded in a zipped folder, or from images already on the server.

Manage Galleries: Shows each gallery, this is where you can add a new one, and page ID’s. Click on the gallery name to see the image listings. This shows the path/link, a thumbnail of each item, and place to add description/details and tags for each image.

Manage Albums: here you can add galleries to an album

Manage image tags: edit existing tags.

Options: Important settings! 7 tabs at the top for custom settings.
–Thumbnails and Images tabs – where you set the sizes of the images
–Effects: choose which JavaScript effect to use. By default the “Shutter” and “Thickbox” are activated. **
–Watermark: Options to set an image, or text which will be applied to images as a watermark, size and position is customizable.
–Slideshow: Set height/width, duration of transitions, effects and more.

Style Editor: To change the CSS. (IF you do, then keep a copy of the old style, just in case. OR copy the entire CSS file and save as a .txt file as a backup.

Roles: In case there are multiple people managing the gallery. Can limit access to what a person can edit.

** To extend the NextGen Gallery with other effects, download the required plugins, this one includes the Lightbox and Highslide effects:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/effects-for-nextgen-gallery/

How to add it to a page or post:

Go to your post/page and enter the tag ‘[ nggallery id=x ]’ or ‘[ slideshow id=x ]’.
See more tags at:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/nextgen-gallery/faq/

Slideshow
To only embed the slideshow without any links to the thumbnail gallery then use the slideshow command. The width and height can be set using the w and h attributes – or in the Gallery/Options/Slideshow page.
Example : [ slideshow id=x w=width h=height ]
(remove the spaces after/before the brackets in the code samples)

Album page
This is the album overview, it’s sortable and you can choose which galleries should appear at this page.
[ album id=x template=extend ]

Gallery page
To show a gallery use the shortcode
[ nggallery id=x ]

Image Browser
A new tag since version 0.60
[ imagebrowser id=x ]