What's The Best Gallery Plugin for Wordpress?

[Kevin]

I'm designing a small business website for my friend. He runs a trophy engraving service and is doing really well at the moment.

I'm going to do a small site using WordPress so that he can easily update the site himself.

I want to add a gallery which can he can easily update and one which integrates with wordpress easily. Preferably I'd like a dedicated gallery page with perhaps the latest pictures or random pics from the gallery on the home page.

Anyone know of a good gallery plugin for wordpress?

[ap4a]

You don't need a plugin, Wordpress will do it all for you. These should help you:

http://www.bloggingtips.com/2008/07/20/wordpress-gallery-and-exif/
http://www.bloggingtips.com/2008/07/27/theming-your-wordpress-gallery/
http://www.bloggingtips.com/2008/08/03/mixing-gallery-and-blog-posts/

[Indyan]

Its true that you dont need a plugin, but in case you go for one give NextGEN Gallery (http://alexrabe.boelinger.com/wordpress-plugins/nextgen-gallery/) a try.

[Kevin]

You don't need a plugin, Wordpress will do it all for you. These should help you:

http://www.bloggingtips.com/2008/07/20/wordpress-gallery-and-exif/
http://www.bloggingtips.com/2008/07/27/theming-your-wordpress-gallery/
http://www.bloggingtips.com/2008/08/03/mixing-gallery-and-blog-posts/

Thanks hurricane. I need to get the domain and theme etc sorted first but I'll look into this.

I'm not sure how user friendly this is for people who aren't that web savvy. I was thinking flickr could be a good option as there are a few plugins available for that.

I'll let you know how I get on :)

Its true that you dont need a plugin, but in case you go for one give NextGEN Gallery (http://alexrabe.boelinger.com/wordpress-plugins/nextgen-gallery/) a try.

Thanks for that. I'll give that a try too :D

[sarahG]

I would say to just use the built in WP image uploader. All your friend would need to do is know how to add and remove photos from it, as once you've added the gallery shortcode to the gallery page, all the photos would be displayed as they're added.

Then your friend would just need to add photos, edit the title and description, and also know how to select images and remove them. Both pretty straightforward once you've been shown how.

To display some random photos on the front page is pretty simple using get_posts(). If you go this route let me know and I can send you the code for it if you want :)

[athlon24]

this coming month, I will help my friend to start his photography blog. basically, the purpose of the blog is to showcase his pictures, is that get_posts() is easy to make. by the way, what does nextgen does?

[sarahG]

I've used pure WordPress (ie. no gallery plugin) for my photo blog. It's not complete but you can see it at http://www.photosfromsarah.net. It's designed to have a mix of galleries and posts, and besides the left sidebar, most of what I used can be read about in the posts that hurricane linked to above.

[athlon24]

wow, how did you do that in your left sidebar? is that a piece of code?

[sarahG]

The sidebar is just created using get_posts(). On any page besides a gallery or individual photo page, it's set to just get the last X (16 I think) photos added. I have my thumbnail settings to about 75*75 I think (or 50*50), so that's the thumbnails pulled out. Then if you're on a gallery page rather than putting the gallery photos in the post I wanted content (which I will write more on when I have time), and just to list the photos in that specific gallery on the left, so again using get_posts() I just pulled out the images for that post using the post ID as the parent ID. Then on the individual photo page I again pulled out the images but used the parent ID of the photo (ie. the gallery post ID) as the parent ID to get all the photos.

So I suppose all of that code is in one of the posts that hurricane linked to, with just a bit of logic and understanding thrown in.