Galleries for Art’s Sake!
The one thing that can be said about Content Management Systems is that they just call out for images! The web has become more visual than ever, and nothing can spiff up a site like a simple but effective image gallery to display everything from your kid’s art to photos of your trip to Botswana.
Image gallery plug-ins are widely available; are generally open source; and can add a little fun to any blog or a certain amount of depth to a commercial site.
Just about every site has its own plugin to upload one image to another site. Flickr, an online photo site, even has a plugin that allows for your newly posted images to appear on Facebook to share with friends.
And they more or less do the same thing. A generic list of what most of these plug-ins offer include:
- Automatic uploading and hosting
- Automatic resizing of photos
- Complete analytic of your traffic
- Support iPhone/iPod and smart phones
- Management of the galleries is simple and straight forward
- Sidebar Widget : Show a slideshow, random or recent picture at your sidebar
- A slideshow of your images
- Post to your blog from anywhere and even if your videos are at home on your PC
- FREE! Open source! On the house!
So many gallery plugins are available! But let’s review a few I’ve found to be quite effective….
Talkin’ ’bout my… NextGEN!
NextGEN Gallery Plugin is one example of a visually appealing gallery plugin.
NextGEN Gallery is a fully integrated gallery plug-in for WordPress with a Flash slideshow option. It allows you to add image effects, custom templates for your theme. You can even move images between galleries. It also provides other useful functions like watermarking and zip upload. Plus, it can easily be installed as a widget.
Or how about support for video as well as still images? I know what you’re thinking: What? Are you insane or something? Yes, but that’s beside the point.
Check out Cincopa WordPress Plugin. This plug-in creates an automated, fully customizable image gallery, slideshows, video and music playlists anywhere within your WordPress site. Choose your videos, images and music and display skin, pages or posts with custom overlay text and rotating thumbnail belts. It supports iPhone/iPod and smart phones. But does it support the iPad? Does anyone actually care?!
A real nice plugin is Picasna WordPress Plugin.
Picasna enables you to present your photos in a stylish and easy-to-browse way on a WordPress blog. You can upload photos to Picasa Web Albums which themselves are actually quite popular with commercial sites that allow for anyone to contribute images that are thematically relative (i.e., newspapers looking for photos of a snowstorm that swallowed up a city) and they will immediately appear on your web page. You will need to apply for a Picasa account via your Google email account to upload photos, though.
Not so much a plugin, but something to consider: an open source program called Visual Lightbox. I’ve used it on my own site Joe Longobardi Photography to effectively display my images without too much scripting on my part. What’s great is that it can download photos from a Flickr account without having to manually insert each individual photo. Okay, that was a plug for me! One other plug (hee-hee!) for Flickr: The Flickr Slideshow plugin! Made specifically for a WordPress blog, it embeds slideshows from a Flickr photo set into posts and pages. Cool!
Can you say MORE Flickr?! Well, one plugin that I have found to be pretty fun is the Flickr Gallery Plugin! Check it out! (I know, I’m such a shameless promoter). This is a neat little WordPress plugin that allows immediate upload of your photos to your WordPress blog. Different arrays are available to alter the presentation of imported images (i.e, as single images or an entire gallery) to fit your page layout. All you need to do is apply for a Flickr API key (oh, and of course you’ll need a Flickr account). Of all the plugins metioned here, I find this the easiest to implement. Though not as graphically “astute” as say Picasna or NextGEN, the ease of updating in Flickr Gallery for me outweighs any bells and whistles associated with the former.
Still, if that’s too much, you can use something like Gallery Widget! A relatively easy to use plugin that, as the name implies is a widget! And we all love widgets! In fact, here’s the most exciting video ever made on this very subject that will have you bristling with the anticipation of your next widget installation!
Enjoy!
