Photoblogs and Galleries in WordPress

There are options to display images in several ways on WordPress. PhotoBlogs are different from normal blogs. Normal blogs put the emphasis on the words with only the occasional image featured. PhotoBlogs are all about the images and not the words. Although there are some good plugins available for this purpose which would be listed in the end, for the time being the Gallery feature of WordPress 2.5 would be discussed. This feature allows the option to add an image gallery to a Post or Page on your WordPress blog.

The gallery short-code is used in a Post or Page to display a thumbnail gallery of images attached to that post. There are several options that may be specified using this syntax:

You can also print a gallery directly in a template like this:

The options supported in this format are several. Some of those are:

You can specify the number of columns. The gallery will include a break tag at the end of each row, and calculate the column width as appropriate. The default value is 3. If ‘columns’ is set to 0, no row breaks will be included. For example, to display a 4 column gallery:

You can also specify the post ID. The gallery will display images which are attached to that post. The default behavior if no ID is specified is to display images attached to the current post. For example, to display images attached to post 123:

Other than that, you can also specify the image size to use for the thumbnail display. Valid values include “thumbnail”, “medium”, “large” and “full”. The default is “thumbnail”. The size of the images for “thumbnail”, “medium” and “large” can be configured in WordPress admin panel under Settings > Media. For example, to display a gallery of medium sized images:

The option of captioning is also available. The name of the XHTML tag is used to enclose each caption. The default is “dd”. For example, to change the gallery markup to use div, span and p-tags:

Finally, you can also use comma separated attachment IDs,

will show only the images from these attachments. And comma separated attachment IDs,

excludes the images from these attachments. However, include and exclude cannot be used together.

Through these simple steps, you can have an attractive and functional photo-blog of your own. In another tutorial, some simple and famous plugins used for this purpose would be discussed.