The Mercer Journal

So I thought I would provide a brief summary of what I did (and what links I found most helpful) to set up my WordPress 2.5 photo gallery. I suspect in future versions of WP this will simplified, but I did quite a bit of searching on the codex and elsewhere in order to find what I found. Maybe this will save others some time.

Step One – Set Up a Gallery Category
This is the category where all your gallery posts will be sorted. Make a note of your gallery category’s ID number. You’ll be using it later.

Step Two – Create a Gallery Post
Start a new post with a series of photos in mind. Give the post a title, some brief text describing what photos are included, then click “Add an Image” up on your “add media” toolbar. You can do a batch upload using this tool (I was able to no problem), though I did read that some folks had problems with the batch upload feature. Once all your photos are “crunched” and uploaded, you can give each photo their titles, descriptions, etc. Save your changes, then click on the gallery tab. There is a button at the bottom which allows you to insert the whole gallery into the post. WordPress will automatically add the gallery shortcode to your post. Save your post, and don’t forget to categorize it in your gallery category that you made in step one.

LINK: Using the Gallery Shortcode
Here’s a great article from the codex about how to customize this gallery shortcode.

Step Three – Create an image.php File
So now that you have a gallery post with thumbnails, the larger version of your photo needs somewhere nice to be displayed when you click on the thumbnail. I noticed that when I clicked on my thumbnails, my photos were displayed in my single.php file. This was not optimal because it had all the stuff under the photo that would normally be displayed under one of my individual posts (like my signature image and my links to similar posts.) Also, my photo had no “next photo,” “previous photo” links, so navigation was clunky at best. Turns out, I needed an image.php file for my photos. This comes with the default theme in WordPress 2.5, but many other themes don’t include it.

LINK: Adding Text Links to WordPress Gallery
Michael Fields has done a wonderful job explaining all you need to do to set up your image.php file, and how to customize the look of your “previous” and “next” navigation. It took a little bit of time to customize the php file for my theme’s css, but it was worth it in the end.

LINK UPDATE for Version 2.6 – edited July 30, 2008 – Michael now has a plugin to make things even easier! Visit Here.

Step Four – Customizing Your Gallery Category
Whew! Now you have your thumbnails and you have a spot just right for your photos to be easily viewed and navigated. What’s more, since your post was placed in your gallery category, all your gallery posts can be easily accessed using your category page as a “launch pad.” One problem, though. Many themes don’t include any kind of thumbnail imagery on the category pages, leaving your gallery category looking, well, very non-gallery-ish…for lack of a better term. I found two WONDERFUL explanations in the codex that helped me whip my gallery category into shape.

LINK: Category Templates
This explains the basics of category templates and their customization.

LINK: 2.5 How to create a category template for a gallery
This is a forum post on WordPress where the details of gallery category code is discussed.

So there you have it. Clear as mud? I’m not accustomed to writing tutorials, but I hope this gives anyone interested some help in getting things up and running.

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