Steps for adding a photo gallery

1. Edit / resize your photographs
2. Create a Gallery
3. Upload photos into the gallery
4. Change the title for your gallery
5. Add a description of your gallery
6. Scan folder for new images (if necessary)
7. Change the sort order of your photographs (optional)
8. Change the Alt + Title text and Description
9. Create a new post with magic code to show off your gallery
10. Add tags and categories (posts only)
11. Preview (optional) and update post

1. Edit / resize your photographs

Using your favourite photo editor (Paint, Picasa, Photoshop, VSO Image Resizer, etc.) resize your photograph to your chosen size. To make viewing and navigating between your pictures easier, the height shouldn’t really be taller than 575 pixels … we’ve found this to be the best size in respect to the differing screen resolutions. Some people have wider, shorter monitors while others have taller, narrower screens on which to see your pics.

What size can your photos be?

When you upload the photos, you’ll see a maximum amount (in Megs) that you’re allowed to upload. Be kind to your website visitors and rather think in terms of kB’s – and your galleries will load far quicker if you keep each photograph under 300 kB (we try to aim for 100 kB). Another advantage of smaller photographs is the amount of disk space that you’ll be saving on your hosting package i.e. you won’t need to upgrade and pay more.

• 640 x 480 for landscape photographs
• 380 x 560 for portrait photographs

2. Create a Gallery

At the Dashboard on the left hand menu, click on Gallery, and then on Add Gallery / Images. Then type in a name for your gallery folder e.g. 090123-paris-project or something for you to recognise … with no spaces!! Then, also very important, click on Add Gallery. If you press <enter> your typing will disappear and your gallery won’t be created.

When your gallery has been created succesfully, you’ll get a confirmation message at the top of the screen, as well as a reference number for your gallery (galleryID) … write this number down – you’ll need it later to link your gallery to your post.

3. Upload photos into the gallery

On the same screen, click on the Upload Images tab, where you can select and upload your images for that gallery. NB: select your new gallery from the drop-down list to make sure the photos are included in your gallery, otherwise you can’t upload any pics. You’re welcome to try uploading your photos in zip file or folder, if you’re comfortable with that. Otherwise you can select which photos you want to upload one at a time.

Tip: select the first photo, then go to the last photo and hold the <Shift> key down and click again. All the photos will be highlighted, then you can click on upload to bring them in together.

4. Change the title for your gallery

After you’ve uploaded your photos, you need to edit your gallery. This information will appear in any Albums that you create. Go to Manage Gallery underneath Gallery. In multi-user environments, you’ll only be able to click on the titles of the galleries that you’ve created. The current title will be the folder name that you’ve just created, so you should make it more friendly. This time you can include spaces. Normally this title is the same as the title for your new post.

Tip: if you don’t see the title, but just they grey bar that says, Gallery Settings … then click on bar to see the rest of the details as per this pic above.

5. Add a description of your gallery

This description appears in albums that consist of different galleries, but it’s also helpful to recognise which gallery you’re working with … especially if there are quite a few!

NB: LEAVE THE PATH ALONE!!! If you change that, WordPress won’t know where your photos are.

Depending on the setup of your gallery and website, you can change the “Page Linked to” setting or leave it as “Not Linked” – this is discussed with our clients during the website build. By default the first photograph becomes the thumbnail for your gallery. Again this is used for albums, and feel free to change it if you want to.

Tip: Click on “Save Changes” whenever you’ve made a change!! This gallery plug-in doesn’t warn you if you leave the page without saving first, you just lose your changes!

6. Scan folder for new images (if necessary)

After editing and saving your gallery title and description, click on Scan folder for new images. The plug-in will look for any new photographs and automatically create a thumbnail picture. This process can take a little while, so don’t interrupt it – let it go to 100% … then you should see little thumbnail pictures of all your photographs, sorted according to their file name.

7. Change the sort order of your photographs (optional)

If you’d prefer to show off your pictures in a different order, click on “Sort Gallery”. You’ll get a different window with square thumbnails of each photo. Move the photos around by clicking on a photo and dragging it to the new position in between two other photos. When you see a large I mark, you can drop the photo there. No mark, no move.

Tip: you can’t drag a photo to the last position. It just doesn’t work. So move your photo to the second last position, and move your last pic to its new position. Voila! Your photo is now in the last position.

8. Change the Alt + Title text and Description

The alt text (top row) is what appears when someone moves their mouse over the thumbnail picture, before viewing the larger pic. So it’s handy for visitors (and search engines) to see what the photo is about. The description line becomes the caption underneath the large picture’s popup window. You can copy and paste the same text from the Alt + Title text into the description field. You can also expand the description if you’d like.

Remember to save your changes!!

If you click somewhere else without saving … sorry for you! You’ve been warned.

Note for the tech-savvy: you can use basic html codes in the description like <strong>… </strong> to bold text, <br> to make a new line and <em> … </em> to italicise the words. Links can be created with <a href=”url”> … </a>.

9. Create a new post and add “the magic code” to show off your gallery

Once you’re done with the gallery and have added captions and titles for each photo (and have saved your changes), you need to create a post (or page) to accompany your photo gallery. Then at the spot where you’d like to include gallery, type in the “magic code” to make your gallery appear.

First press <enter> to create a blank line for your gallery. Then remeber Step 2 – Create a Gallery? You should have written down the gallery id. This is where you need to type in the number. If you didn’t write the gallery id down, then you can find it again under Gallery -> Manage Gallery … you’ll see a list of all your galleries, and the very first column on the left shows the gallery ids! Cool, hey?

In the blank link, type in [ gallery=id# ] but without the spaces!! I’ve needed to add the spaces so that this post won’t try to call up a gallery. If your gallery id is 9, then it would be [ gallery=9 ] without the spaces between square brackets!!

10. Add tags and categories (posts only)

Lastly, if this is not a page, then you’ll need to add tags and categories relevant to the post and photo gallery.

11. Preview / Publish

Then all that’s left is to preview (optional) and Publish your post/page, or Update Post/Page if it already exists.