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Adding a Photo Gallery to a WordPress Post or Page Inserting one photo at a time when writing a WordPress post is pretty straightforward, but what if you

want to add a whole collection of photos? Suppose you’re taking a trip around the world and you’ve set

up your blog to chronicle your travels, and in each post you want to include a dozen shots of the city you

visited that day?

The good news is that WordPress has gallery features built in, so you don’t even need a plugin to add a

basic photo gallery to a post or page.

The bad news is that it requires more steps than adding a single photo. In fact, if you’re not used to

WordPress, the latest features to help you display galleries might just make things more confusing for

you. (The WordPress development team knows it needs to work on media, but hasn’t had a chance to

tackle that yet. Improvements are in the pipeline.)

Meanwhile, WordPress galleries aren’t really that difficult once you get used to them, and there are

some great plugins and themes to allow you to add some spectacular effects. Here are the steps to

insert a no-frills photo gallery without adding any plugins.

1. Open the edit screen for the post or page where you want to insert the gallery. You can create a

new post, or add the gallery to an existing post.

2. Position your cursor where you want the gallery to appear. Moving galleries after you insert

them is more trouble than putting them in the right place to start with.

3. Click the Insert Image button at the top left of the post/page editing area.

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4. Click the From Computer tab to upload the images for your gallery.

5. Select and upload multiple images at once.

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(Windows users can select non-consecutive images by holding down the CTRL key while clicking

the icons; Mac users can do the same with the CMD key. To select consecutive images, hold

down the SHIFT key.) Click Open when you’ve finished selecting images.

Tip: If you really are traveling around the world, uploading photos from your camera in

an Internet café anywhere but Japan or South Korea can be pretty time-consuming.

These days, even point-and-shoot cameras boast resolutions of 12 megapixels or more.

That’s a 4000 x 3000 pixel image: each JPG file will be 2.5 MB. A set of them will take

forever to upload over patchy hotel wi-fi or the satellite connection in that Mexican

café.

If you don’t plan to print the photos when you get home, go into your camera settings

and set your photo size and quality below the maximum. An image size of 1600 or even

1200 pixels on the longest edge is plenty for a website.

6. Wait until WordPress has finished “crunching” the files and click the Save All Changes button at

the bottom of the list of images.

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Power Users’ Clinic: Add Titles and Descriptions to Gallery Images

For bonus points, after you click “Save all changes”, click “Show” next to each image and fill in each

image’s title, alternate text, caption, and description. Then Save all changes again. Giving the images

titles that mean something to you helps the search engines find you and it helps screen readers for

the visually impaired. And it will help you, too, when you’re going through your media library trying

to find a particular photo.

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7. After you click “Save all changes”, the Gallery tab appears at the top of the Add an Image dialog

box. From now on, whenever you click the Add an Image button for that post, you’ll see the

Gallery tab between From URL and Media Library. That tab only appears in posts that have had

galleries inserted. The number in parentheses after the word “Gallery” shows how many images

are in the gallery.

8. Choose your Gallery Settings from the options below the list of images in the gallery. This is

where you decide what order to put the pictures in and how many columns your gallery should

have.

If your gallery is going to appear on a page with a sidebar and you use the standard 150 x 150

pixel thumbnail size, you won’t be able to fit more than three images across. But if you use a

full-width page for your galleries, or a smaller thumbnail size, you can have five or six columns of

photos.

Note: to change the size of your image thumbnails, go to Settings Media.

In addition to the built-in options to sort the images by Menu Order, Date/Time, Title, and

Random, you can manually order your images by numbering them in the boxes in the Actions

column and clicking “Save all changes” again.

The final option is whether to link the thumbnails to the original image file or to the attachment

page. If you’ve filled in an image description or want people to be able to submit comments on a

particular image, then it’s best to link to the attachment page. Lightbox and slideshow plugins

tend to override this option, but some will display the descriptions from the attachment page.

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9. When you’re happy with your settings, click the Insert gallery button.

Once you click the button, a gallery placeholder appears in your post editor window. If you’re

using the visual editor, the gallery placeholder looks like this:

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If you’re using the HTML editor, the gallery placeholder looks like this:

What you’re looking at is called a gallery shortcode. (A “shortcode” is a command in square

brackets that substitutes for HTML or PHP.) If you need to move your gallery around in your

post, the easiest way is to switch to the HTML editor and cut and paste that shortcode.

10. If your theme supports post formats, toggle the “Gallery” radio button on. That way your gallery

can take advantage of any special design features your theme has for galleries.

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WordPress introduced post formats in 2011 with WordPress 3.1. They’re designed to

help display certain kinds of content in special ways, much the way Tumblr does.

Older themes may not support post formats, or may support them in a different way. The

Coraline theme from Automattic supports Gallery and Aside post formats, but you have to

designate categories in the theme options in order to use them. If you’re inserting a gallery in

the Coraline theme, be sure to choose the right category.

If your theme doesn’t support post formats, don’t worry. The gallery itself will display just fine.

The main difference will be in the way the post excerpt appears on the blog index page.

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11. And now for the last crucial step: publish the post or page.

Your gallery post appears as a grid of neatly arranged thumbnails.

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The actual galleries appear much the same in Coraline (above) and Twenty Eleven (below).

So What Does the Gallery Post Format Do? If WordPress galleries themselves look the same in themes that support the gallery post format and

those that don’t, what does the gallery post format actually do?

First, it gives the designer the opportunity to make the rest of the post look different from other kinds of

posts—making it a full-width post where a standard post has a sidebar, for instance, or giving it a

particular background color.

Second, it changes the way the post appears in the blog index (the home page). The themes used for the

screenshots above both show post excerpts in the blog index. For a standard post, the excerpt is just a

few lines of unformatted text. That wouldn’t work very well for a gallery, so a gallery post excerpt is set

up to work a little differently.

“Coraline” and “Twenty Eleven” both represent gallery posts with a single thumbnail image and tell you

how many images are in the gallery, but the Coraline excerpt has a box around it and a link to “more

galleries.” The Twenty Eleven excerpt has a label above it saying “Gallery.” Those differences are design

choices made by the theme developers.

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Coraline Gallery Post Excerpt 1

Twenty Eleven Gallery Post Excerpt 1

If galleries are important to you, check out the way a theme handles the gallery post format in the demo

before you decide to use it. Sure, you can hack the CSS in the stylesheet or install a plugin to change it,

but the better it works in the first place, the better off you are.

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Power Users’ Clinic: Gallery Shortcodes In earlier versions of WordPress, the only way to insert a gallery was with the shortcode [gallery]. Used by itself (you can type it into either the visual editor or the HTML editor), the [gallery] shortcode will display a gallery of all images attached to that post or page.

But you can do more, because shortcodes come with options. In fact, the [gallery] shortcode comes with more options than you have when you insert a gallery through the file upload screen. The options associated with the [gallery] shortcode are:

columns: number of columns in the gallery.

id: ID of the post whose images you want to display. It does not have to be the post you’re putting the gallery into. You can find the post ID by hovering over the post title in the All Posts list and looking down into the lower left corner. You’ll see a small popup that says something like “http://your.domain.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=ID&action=edit,” except there will be a number after the “post=” instead of the word “ID”. That’s the post ID number.

size: the image size to use for the thumbnail grid: thumbnail, medium, large, or full. The default is “thumbnail.”

orderby: the criterion for ordering images. The choices are menu_order, date, title, ID, and RAND.

order: ASC (ascending) or DESC (descending).

link: determines whether the thumbnails link to full-size images (file) or attachment pages (attachment).

include: tells the gallery to include specific attachment (image) IDs. You find these by going into the WordPress Media Library and hovering over the image title. A popup appears in the lower left corner of the browser, the same way it did to show you the post ID.

exclude: tells the gallery to exclude specific attachment (image) IDs. You can use either the “include” or the “exclude” option in one shortcode, but not both.

So if you wanted to insert a gallery that used a single column of large images, ordered by ID, and including attachments 17, 18, 19, 25, 26, 27, 34, 35, 36 (from three different posts), the shortcode would look like this:

[gallery columns="1" size="large" orderby="ID" order="ASC" link="attachment" include="17, 18, 19, 25, 26, 27, 34, 35, 36"]

And then there are the really geeky options that probably won’t be of interest to anyone but theme designers:

itemtag: the type of (X)HTML tag used to enclose each item in the gallery. The default is “dl”, which is “definition list.”

icontag: the tag used to enclose each thumbnail image. The default is “dt”, or “definition term.”

captiontag: the tag used to enclose the caption for each thumbnail. The default is “dd” or “definition definition.”

A designer might want to change these if definition lists are going to be important in the theme, but ordinary people can safely ignore them.