Building WordPress image galleries is a rather painless process and allows you to display a set of photos/images to your users inside posts/pages related to an event or topic.
In case you are interested in seeing what the result looks like, you may want to look at the Kgaswane Nature Reserve post I wrote on the Rustenburg website I built for my town/city. It has a set of photos in a WordPress post in a gallery format. Beautiful, isn’t it? Yes, the nature reserve is beautiful as well!
What You Need
Before we get started, there are two WordPress plugins which you are going to need. Neither of them are specifically required but I recommend them since they integrate very well and will provide your users with a more pleasant browsing experience and also gives you the flexibility that you need.
The first plugin was developed by myself personally. I released it on the Tribulant Software website and it requires a license. It integrates the Lightbox JavaScript library into WordPress and gives you the ability to display images in an overlay on the same page.
The second plugin is a free, GPL based plugin which was developed by Peggy & Justin Hawkwood. The Gallery Plus plugin simply adds configuration values for the WordPress “gallery” shortcode in the “Settings” section of your WordPress dashboard.
Upload both of these plugins to your “wp-content/plugins/” folder after downloading and extracting them. With the plugins uploaded, go to your “Plugins” section in your WordPress dashboard and activate them. By activating these plugins, they are ready for use and you can configure them according to your needs in the “Settings” section of WordPress.
In order for the WordPress Lightbox plugin overlay effects to be used when you insert the WordPress gallery shortcode, you need to change a configuration value in the Gallery Plus plugin. Go to “Settings” > “Gallery Plus” in your WordPress dashboard and change the “rel value in <a> tag” setting to “lightbox”.
Building a WordPress Image Gallery
Before you can insert an image gallery into a WordPress post, page or theme, you’ll need to upload/attach some photos/images to a WordPress post or page. You can do this by writing a new post or editing an existent post and make use of the media uploader integrated into the WYSYWIG editor of WordPress to upload your images.
IMPORTANT : Replace the curly brackets in the codes below with block brackets. In other words, “{” becomes “[" and "}" becomes "]“. Otherwise it will not work.
With a few images uploaded to a post/page, you can insert the following code directly into the content of the post/page where you want the WordPress image gallery to appear.
This WordPress gallery shortcode will be replaced with thumbnails of all the images you uploaded to the specified post/page using the media uploader mentioned above.
If you prefer to insert an image gallery into a WordPress theme, you can do so by inserting code like below into your WordPress theme files.
There are several options you can specify when executing the WordPress gallery shortcode. For example, when hardcoding the image gallery directly into your WordPress theme, you’ll need to specify an “id” attribute to tell WordPress which post/page’s images you would like to show.
December 31st, 2008 at 1:01 am
I have used it. Many thanks.
Can you give me any wordpress image gallery theme.
I am waiting for your kind reply.
Regards
Muddasar Khan
January 25th, 2009 at 11:36 am
Good information on your site for this story and your post looks very interesting. Keep up the good work.
February 16th, 2009 at 5:30 pm
Good information useful for us and also valuable
April 20th, 2009 at 10:46 am
Nice pics there. Have fun!
June 6th, 2009 at 6:45 am
Good one, galleries can be useful at times especially for projects etc
Thanks for posting them
June 11th, 2009 at 12:31 pm
Antonie
Thanks for this.
The Kgaswane Nature Reserve post pictures are really beautiful while the Rustenburg site has a lovely clean, professional feel to it. I’ve toyed with the idea of doing one for my home town here in Carshalton, England, but still haven’t got round to it. Your site has inspired me to take some action.
Now all I’ve got to do is find the time!
Ben
June 13th, 2009 at 1:35 am
This post is full of great information. Thanks for the post.
June 15th, 2009 at 11:54 am
Hi Ben,
Thank you for the kind words. I wish you all the best of luck with starting a business directory for your home town.
All the best,
Antonie
June 20th, 2009 at 6:53 pm
Hi Antonie
You’re welcome and thanks for your good wishes. If I get the project off the ground, I’ll let you have a link.
Take care.
Ben
June 21st, 2009 at 2:58 am
Great article. I’m hoping to start a new blog. And I wanted to add an image gallery to it. This information is very useful. Thanks for sharing.
June 23rd, 2009 at 1:18 am
Thanks, I enjoyed your post immensely. It’s nice to see someone writing something worth reading
June 24th, 2009 at 6:44 am
I was looking for a way to setup a pic gallery, This helps a lot. Thanks for sharing the information.
July 2nd, 2009 at 5:06 am
Great Info!
Thank you, for your posting, Gallery Plus was the script Im searching for!
Greetings Martin
July 5th, 2009 at 6:23 am
I run several WP-blogs. Most of them are in german. The german blogging communitz is a kind of strange so I try to avoid them.
I am glad to find sites like this and have in general the feeling that the WP-Community in english is much more helpful than the german one and of course offers a bigger veriety in themes and plugins.
Therefore I am happy to spend some hours to adjust the themes and plugins (most of them are ok) to german.
to all out there who are sharing their knowlegde and Ideas.. Thank you a lot
July 5th, 2009 at 10:32 pm
That’s certainly a great post. Galleries are really good components for your blog. Thanks for the information. Certainly would be very useful. Cheers
July 15th, 2009 at 9:44 am
My friend who commented earlier recommended this post to me. I was looking for a way to add an image gallery to my site. This really helped me out. Thanks for sharing.
July 17th, 2009 at 5:27 pm
Galleries have many uses. Thanks for sharing some of these pointers.
July 22nd, 2009 at 11:14 am
Great! Woo!
I agree with you!
Thank you for sharing this with us.
July 23rd, 2009 at 6:38 am
Good information on your site for this story and your post looks very interesting. Keep up the good work.
July 29th, 2009 at 6:24 am
I should say that I was really impressed with your “WordPress Gallery Plus Plugin”… It worked very well… The suggestion on how to use these plugins on wordpress was worth implementing.. Thanks for the lovely post…I have bookmarked your blog..
July 30th, 2009 at 11:47 am
Great job that you do with “WordPress Lightbox Plugin” i see it in action by my frien designs. He told me about this page. Just want to say you: You plugin is awesome, even when im not a web desing, was easy to understand and make a lot of image galleryes.
Thanks.
August 3rd, 2009 at 11:03 pm
wow, nice, thank your so much for your sharing ～
August 11th, 2009 at 3:41 am
I was looking for a way to implement a photo gallery in my site on work wear. This explained a lot to me. I’m glad that I came across your post. It was very informative. Learnt a lot from it. Thanks for sharing.
August 12th, 2009 at 6:05 am
Nice article and a very interesting post.
Galleries are a useful resource – especially during certain projects. Have fun !
August 21st, 2009 at 7:48 am
It is definitely a wonderful idea
the picture can be stored in a page maybe with category too and if you just want to publish an image you are free to comment it directly from that page 
August 21st, 2009 at 12:35 pm
Thanks for the interesting post on WP image galleries. I look forward to reading more posts from you in the future.
August 27th, 2009 at 3:06 am
It’s very useful plug in for WordPress, and I often use it in my blogs
August 29th, 2009 at 4:08 pm
If you put the pics on Flickr then one solution might be Pictobrowser. It makes a nice gallery that you can embed in a page or blog posting. It will grab pics, that you specify, from your Flickr account. I have used it in WordPress though the linked page seems to offer a link to another site that suggests some small config (a plugin) might be necessary to get it work to work with WordPress (config that I don’t remember having to do to get it to work for me).
September 14th, 2009 at 2:55 am
Thanks for the tips, i want to build photo gallery for blog wordpress posting. thanks.
September 15th, 2009 at 10:17 pm
Can this be implements with HTML:TAGS? this plugin is really cool but i cant seem to get it working. can anyone help?
September 19th, 2009 at 3:39 pm
Looks wonderful, and with it setting up a Gallery Category so that all pictures which are in the post, are also accessible there? Right? I got the upload scenario which is great but the Image Gallery is also very good.
September 20th, 2009 at 10:20 am
Thanks for the interesting post on WP image galleries. I look forward to reading more posts from you in the future.
September 21st, 2009 at 8:10 am
This is a really good feature and I love this effect, Thanks for the useful tut.
September 28th, 2009 at 10:58 am
The problem with finding an “ultimate” WP photo gallery is that there are so many different conceptual frameworks for presenting and administering this kind of thing; you and any given programmer may have different ideas about what’s best. And even the best of them probably won’t be as slick as Flickr, simply because of the resources available. There are some that act as blog-integrators for Flickr (or other photo-hosting services), like Slickr, which indeed looks pretty slick.
September 30th, 2009 at 8:01 am
Thanks for this, been exploring various gallery options and this had a lot of the features I was looking for – one question, in your example you have a “next” link in the fotter of the image in the lightbox.
In my implementation the next/previous are only shown on rolling over the image. Is there a way to implement this gallery the way you have it?
Thanks!
October 4th, 2009 at 10:24 am
What a nice article! I am confused now. Nice work!
October 5th, 2009 at 8:10 am
This would avoid so much frustration for users if WP had an incorporated and uncomplicated Gallery that allowed comments, that could simply be turned on or off during installation.
October 7th, 2009 at 4:24 am
Do the images have to be of the same size in terms of width and height, can you use images of different sizes within a frame to make the gallery have less of a blocky feel?
October 23rd, 2009 at 8:01 pm
We are moving to a WordPress blog, I’m going to need as much good info as I can get.
October 28th, 2009 at 2:57 am
Really awesome. i was looking to add a image gallery in one of my WordPress blogs. This article is just what I wanted. Thanks for the article. Cheers
October 28th, 2009 at 8:05 pm
WordPress gallery is great thanks for sharing this info on the plugins.
October 29th, 2009 at 11:06 am
Thanks for the good post.
October 30th, 2009 at 11:45 am
Can this be implemented in other ways like tags? This seems to be a really cool plugin and I can’t wait to implement it.
November 3rd, 2009 at 8:09 pm
I am a big fan of NextGen Gallery. I feel it can do anything and everything I and my clients need.
November 4th, 2009 at 8:34 am
Looks good, I was looking for an easy image gallery option in wordpress, instead I ended up using an external one till I found this.
November 13th, 2009 at 1:15 pm
This plugin works very well but i don’t know how to configure it to change the borders width. Thank you for suggestion !
November 17th, 2009 at 1:54 am
I have used the Lightbox gallery and it was quite good to make the gallery more live and visually appealing.
December 11th, 2009 at 1:52 am
That’s really neat. The gallery is now one important component of a site with all the photography around nowadays. Thanks. Cheers
December 20th, 2009 at 6:27 am
I’ve experimented with this gallery a bit, but not too much. It’s pretty awesome and works very well for a portfolio type blog.
December 27th, 2009 at 10:43 pm
Great plug-in. I needed to implement a gallery for my club and I was looking all around with various methods even using picasa and flickr. But I guess this is the best way. Thanks.
December 28th, 2009 at 7:21 am
This is fantastic, i’m just starting up with my blog and I’ve just learnt so much from this! thank you so much for sharing this! brilliant stuff! cheers
December 28th, 2009 at 11:30 pm
Love the plug-in. Just tried it out and installation was such a breeze. Anyone can do it. Thanks.
January 4th, 2010 at 12:51 pm
well,What you need to do is add a text widget to your sidebar and insert the HTML code that displays the image that you want. There’s an excellent article on this blog which tells you how to insert a sidebar image
February 3rd, 2010 at 12:08 am
That’s a really neat idea. I surely would love to try it out while upgrading my blog. Has it got any newer version I could use? I know newer is now always better but I would like to try the newest ones
February 6th, 2010 at 9:08 pm
thanks for the tips
February 8th, 2010 at 12:57 pm
[] are brackets.
{} are braces.
February 23rd, 2010 at 3:17 am
Thanks for the share. Love the pics and obviously a useful tool.
March 10th, 2010 at 10:08 am
Very interesting this plugin , it’s simple to use and pratic
good !
thanks
April 9th, 2010 at 7:29 pm
Hi
I’ve just purchased your gallery and installed, but I get the message “The plugin does not have a valid header.” and then it doesn’t install … Can you help?
May 27th, 2010 at 7:08 am
Thanks for sharing… super stuff!