In some situations, you may want a WordPress Photo Gallery as an addition to a WordPress plugin. This post covers the different WordPress Plugins required to create the photo gallery.

The Plugin: NextGEN Gallery

After testing a few WordPress photo gallery plugins, I suggest the NextGEN Gallery plugin. The NextGEN Gallery plugin is really easy to use and really easy to install. It provides robust features, such as a flash interface for viewing photos, and a well built backend for creating and editting galleries.

Installing NextGEN Gallery

You can download the NextGen Gallery WordPress plugin here.

It installs as any other plugin would. Once installed, a new subheader will appear at the bottom of the admin panel. You can manage all of your galleries here.

Using NextGEN Gallery

From this point on, NextGEN gallery is fairly simple to use. You have the option of uploading photos, importing photos that you have already uploaded, or uploading a zip file full of photos. Take caution – you may have weird results when using the import photos option. When you upload a photo with WordPress, it automatically creates smaller versions of the photo. This would cause you to have /wp-content/uploads/2009/02/image-300x180.png, /wp-content/uploads/2009/02/image-150x150.png, /wp-content/uploads/2009/02/image.png, etc. When you import photos using the NextGEN Gallery, it will take all of these duplicates to be different photos. For that reason I had around three copies of every photo in my gallery. Things seem to work fine otherwise.

I didn’t play with NextGEN gallery for too long, since I don’t actually have any images to show, but it seems really cool. You have lots of options when it comes to style, setup, etc. I’m not sure how well NextGEN Gallery works with Search Engines. Since it is powered by JavaScript (or sometimes Flash), I can only assume that it doesn’t do too well. Oh well, it’s still worth it sometimes. You can create really cool photo galleries with NextGEN, so I suppose that the gallery will attract users itself, without the help of search engines.

To add a gallery to a post, just put [ gallery=id] in your post, where id is the id of the gallery. It’s as simple as that.

Are you using the NextGEN Gallery plugin? Did this post help you discover this plugin and get it working? Leave a comment with a link to your gallery. I’d be happy to see it. Also, if you have any questions, please leave a comment.

Tags: NextGen Gallery, WordPress Photo Gallery, WordPress Plugins