Using NextGEN Gallery

Posted on | July 10, 2009 | 1 Comment

NextGen Gallery is a very robust WordPress plugin for creating and managing an image gallery on your WordPress blog. It is best used for displaying a large amount of photos at once, and alleviates the need to insert pictures manually like we described in How to Insert a Picture into Post in Wordpress.

Pica Design will install NextGen Gallery for you if you need photo management in your blog. It’s a free plugin, and if you feel that it would make your blog better don’t hesitate to ask us to install it.

This tutorial will be split into a few steps, uploading pictures, managing galleries, and adding your images to posts.

Uploading a picture to NextGen Gallery isn’t a hard task.

1. Click on the ‘Gallery’ tab on the sidebar, then the ‘Add Gallery/Images’ subtabs
2. If you don’t have any galleries, create one in the ‘Add New Gallery’ page, otherwise just go to one of the image uploading tools.
3. There are 3 ways of uploading your images to WordPress through NextGen Gallery
   • Upload a Zip-File allows you to upload a .zip file containing images to the server. Zip files can be created on both Windows and Mac computers. Make the .zip file containing one or more pictures, select it on your computer using ‘Select Zip-File,’ choose the gallery you want the files to be imported into, and click ‘Start Upload.’
   • Import Image Folder allows you to select images hosted on your web server. Uploading images to your server needs use of a FTP client and is fairly advanced. If you feel that this would be the best way for you to upload files, contact Pica Design and we will teach you how to do this.
   • Upload Images is more similar to the default WordPress uploader. It allows you to upload images individually and to place them in whichever gallery you choose. Select the pictures you want to upload and the gallery you want it in and then push ‘Upload Images’
4. You now have a Gallery with pictures in it. Look at the gallery below for picture representations of these steps.

[View with PicLens]

Managing your galleries is simple with NextGen Gallery too.

1. Go to the ‘Manage Gallery’ subtab of ‘Gallery’
2. Select the gallery you want to manage or create a new one. (If you want to delete a gallery find the one you want to delete and push the delete button on the far right side of the page.)
3. Here you can set the title and description of the whole gallery, create a page for the gallery, and rescan the gallery for new images as well as set titles, descriptions, and tags for individual pictures. You can also exclude certain pictures from appearing in galleries and by using the checkboxes and drop down menu you can apply batch actions to more than one photo in the set.

[View with PicLens]

Adding your images to your posts is what NextGen Gallery is made for, and it is super easy.

1. Start writing a post.
2. Go to where you want to insert your Gallery.
3. Click the ‘Add NextGen Gallery’ button on the action bar.
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4. Decide whether you want to insert a gallery, album, or a single picture
   • A gallery inserts a whole gallery
   • An album is a collection of more than one gallery (you can create them in the ‘Albums’ subtab of ‘Gallery’)
   • A single picture is just that, you can insert a single picture you’ve added to one of your galleries.
5. Go to the tab of whichever option of inserting pictures you want.
6. Select the options you want. Play around to discover what style you like best.

Basketball 1

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Hope this helped you understand NextGen Gallery. It is a very powerful but complex plugin, and while core functionality is simple, it is possible to do a lot with it. Play around with the settings to find what works best for you and your site.

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