Jenn Mears Web Design

My latest project needed a lot of plugin help. It’s a site for a parenting group that the board of directors needed to develop into an online community forum, calendar, newsletter and, last but not least, a photo gallery for news and events.

The online gallery portion of the site had several criteria: 1) It had to be something that displayed the photos directly on the Photos page. 2) It needed to be something that people could upload their own images to. 3) It had to be fairly easy to use without involving a whole lot of hand-coding.

At first, the Shashin plugin seemed like the way to go, but after fiddling and twiddling and searching for online information beyond the simple statement; “Shashin is a photo gallery plugin that’s really awesome!” I got fed up and started looking again. NextGEN seemed like another good prospect, so I plugged it in and gave it a whirl.

To my immense relief, it was a good choice. The interface is fairly intuitive and there seems to be more support on how to actually USE the thing. For a good overview, check out Kansaiblogger’s post.

Since I knew I needed something a little more comprehensive for the people who would actually be running the site, I decided to write this short tutorial on how to add galleries and images to your Wordpress site using NextGEN.

This is assuming you have already downloaded the NextGEN plugin and then uploaded it and activated it on your Wordpress installation.

Step 1
Log into your Dashboard and click on “Gallery”

Step 2
Click on “Add Gallery”

Step 3
Add a new Gallery to your WP install by typing in the title you want to use for the gallery.

Step 4
After clicking “Add Gallery” you should see the notice that a new gallery has been added.

(Jenn Tip: Make note of the gallery’s tag. It’s how you can ID your galleries when you are working with a page’s code.)

Step 5
Now that you have created a new gallery, you can either go right ahead and start uploading images, or, if you have to go cook dinner or something, you can come back to your gallery by using the main dashboard and clicking on Gallery again. From there, you can start uploading images directly to a gallery of your choice.

Step 6
Now that you are ready to upload pictures, it’s pretty straight forward. In the upload window, simply browse to the image you want to upload to the gallery you’ve created.

Step 7
Once you’ve uploaded the image, you’ll get a notice that everything went well:

Step 8
Keep adding images to your gallery until you are done. Then, from the main dashboard, go to Manage, then Pages and then click on the page you want to add photos to. Once the editing interface opens up, notice the little button that looks like this to the top right of the editing toolbar. Click on that to add images to your gallery page.

Step 9
You get a choice of adding a Gallery, an Album or a Picture. In this case, I’m going to insert a picture from the gallery I just created. Click on the Picture tab, select the image you want from the dropdown list and then choose your size and positioning.

Jenn Tip: To make sure your images don’t get distorted, you may need to type in the dimensions of the photo manually like so:

Step 10
Click on Insert to put the picture where you want on the Page:

Once you’ve inserted your picture, you’ll see the following code has been added to your page:

Stay tuned for more about how to use various features from this plugin!