At Pagemaster we want you be successful in your online marketing. We create websites and provide you training to see you succeed. This post is part of our series from our Site Training Workbook.
NextGen Gallery is the plugin we use to manage portfolios/galleries for artist sites. It allows for fine control over how images are sorted and displayed, and it also allows watermarks to be applied of the client wishes.
How NextGen sorts images
NextGen has its own way of sorting images, and it takes a bit of effort to understand completely. Images are sorted into a Gallery, which can then be filed into an Album. So, for instance, you may have an Album called Paintings and an Album called Sculpture or Photographs. The Paintings Album could then hold Galleries called Landscapes, Figures, etc. You can even go so far as to include an Album within an Album. This is more complexity than many sites desire/require, but it is an option. So, let’s
create a Gallery, add it to an Album, then add that to our Portfolio page in WordPress.
Creating a New Gallery
Before you can add images to a Gallery, you must make one. Here’s how.
- From the Admin Dashboard, scroll down the left hand menu and hover over Gallery, then click Add Gallery/Images.
- From the tabs at the top, select Add new gallery.
- Name your gallery according to what type of images it will hold. For example, Acrylics.
- Click Add Gallery. That’s it!
Adding Images to a Gallery
- From the Gallery menu in the Admin sidebar menu, click Add Gallery / Images.
- Upload Images will be selected. That’s what we want. Next to Choose files to upload, click Select Files.
- Select all of the images you want to upload from the server or a hard drive, etc. Images to be added should be found in the client’s Site folder, under XX-Supplied, then perhaps in a folder marked Portfolio.
- Once you’ve confirmed your selection, you have the option to Scale images to max width 800px or max height 600px. What this means is that NextGen will actually create web-sized versions for you as it uploads the files. This can work well, especially for smaller batches of files. If your images are already an appropriate size, don’t select this as it does take up server resources (and time).
- You’ll find a drop down to select which Gallery you’d like to insert the images into. Assuming you’ve created the gallery (see previous walkthrough), select it.
- Click Upload Images. You will see a status bar appear telling you how the upload is going. Just let the plugin do its work at this point. You’re done.
Editing a Gallery and the images inside
There are many things you can do with your galleries. Most commonly, you’ll want to rename the images, add descriptions, etc. Let’s do that now.
- From the Gallery menu in the Admin sidebar menu, click Manage Gallery.
- A list of choices appears. Click the name of the Gallery you’d like to edit.
- A list of options appears with a list of images below it. You can fill out any of the options you like for each image. After you do, be sure to click Save Changes.
Displaying Gallery on Your Site
We will have already done this for you when we set up your site, but if you want to put a gallery in another page or even a post simply use this code where you want it placed.
[nggallery id=x] Replace the “x” with the number of the gallery you want to display.