Showcase your website’s photography in a gallery!
There’s nothing like great photography to make a website unforgettable, right?
While it’s true that great photography is important, how you display that photography is equally important. If you have good photos that are oddly placed on your site, or that are too small for people to really see, you might as well not have the photos at all.
One very popular way to showcase photography on a site is to use a photo gallery. If you haven’t ever done it before, you might not know where to start when adding a WordPress photo gallery. But never fear, it’s actually not very hard to do.
First, you’ll want to go to the post or page where you want to add the photo gallery and click “Add Media” when your cursor is where you’d like the gallery to appear. Once the “Add Media” box pops up, on the left hand side you’ll see an option to click where it says “Create Gallery”.
After you click “Create Gallery”, you’ll have the same options to either select photos from the media library or upload new photos that you would normally have when adding just one image. You can select multiple images to put in your gallery, and a check box will appear in the upper right corner of that image to let you know it’s one of the selected images. Then, you click “Create New Gallery”.
At this point, you can rearrange the order of your images by dragging them to the new place you want them, or you can just click the “Reverse Order” button to reverse the order of the images or the “random order” check box if you want the photos to show up in a random order every time. You can also change the look of your gallery by deciding how many columns you want.
This is also the point at which you can click on each image and edit the links, titles, captions, alt tags and descriptions. And if you realize you’ve forgotten to add a picture, you can click “Add to Gallery” to go back and choose more photos. Then, when everything is just how you want it, click “Insert Gallery”.
This will add the gallery to your post, and you can see it in the Visual editor. If you need to go back and edit the gallery later, you just click on the gallery in the Visual editor, then click the pencil that appears in the top left corner. Or, if you want to delete the gallery, you can click the “X” that appears.
By default, when you go to look at the live version of your gallery, clicking on one of the photos will bring you to that photos’s attachment page. If you would instead like it to show up in a carousel format (large photo with a dark background and you can click to the next photo), you will have to use a plugin. There are a bunch of great plugins out there that you can check out, but the one I use most is the Carousel part of Jetpack. If you go into the Jetpack Settings, you can activate Carousel, and then all of the galleries on your website will automatically be shown in a Carousel format.
There you have it, everything you need to showcase the beautiful photography you have for you website!
What about you? Are you a big fan of using photo galleries on your website?