Photo galleries are a very essential part of blogs and are utilized to show off personal photographs (if it’s a personal blog) or pictures of various events.
There are different ways to Integrate Your Photo Gallery into WordPress and here is the list of most of them:
WordPress media gallery: Earlier to WordPress 2.5 every person was dependent on various plugins, whereas now it’s quite possible to have WordPress gallery as an element of the wordpress 2.5 release. Consequently to combine the gallery you must follow these simple steps:
- In the dashboard go to Write.
- Click on Image icon next to Add Media (Just below the Title text box).
- Browse the image which you want to upload and click on the upload button.
- Click on insert button to insert the photo gallery.
Following these steps will help you in integrating the photo gallery in the blog post and you just need to use your creativity to make the full use of it. Though WordPress gallery provides very limited features still you can find many other plugins which are far more advanced than WordPress gallery features, let’s have a look at those plugins-
1) NextGEN Gallery
This plugin is a CMS in itself. NextGen gallery provides rich feature plugin and is frequently compared to photo gallery CMS’ like Coppermine photo gallery, Gallery, Plogger etc. this plugin provides a feature where you can upload the zip files and extract itself to form a new album resulting in saving alt of time. It is so advanced that all its features cannot be explained at once. Here is the list of some features:
- Sortable Albums : Create your own sets of image
- Upload a Zip-File with pictures : Upload pictures in a zip-file (Not in Safe-mode)
- Watermark function : You can add a watermark image or text
- JavaScript Effect : Use any available popular image effect : Thickbox, Lightbox or Highslide
- Multiple CSS Stylesheet : Use a nice shadow effect for your thumbnails with your own CSS file
- Slideshow : Full integrated flash slideshow
- TinyMCE : Button integration for easy adding the gallery tags
- Sidebar Widget : Show a slideshow, random or recent picture at your sidebar
- Language support : Translated in more than 15 languages
- Upload tab integration : You have access to all pictures via the upload tab
- Tag support for images : Append related images to your post
- Meta data support : Import EXIF, IPTC or XMP meta data
- Sort images feature
2) PhotoXhibit
This is another great image gallery plugin. PhotoXhibit helps you in presenting photos in best possible ways. It permits you to display images from your Flickr, Picasa & SmugMug accounts too. You can even change the appearance of the gallery with a lot of ease with the inbuilt style editor.
3) Inserting Flickr images as gallery
There are many plugins which allows you to insert photographs from Flickr, PhotoXhibit). However when it comes to play around with Flickr images, WordPress is the first preference.
It’s a wonderful plugin and displays the images with some fresh ajax effects too.
I leave it up to you that which plugin will you chose, however, if you ask for my opinion about plugin then it would be NextGEN Gallery plugin for certain.
