WordPress 3.5 Elvin is released and with it comes the biggest change ever – a completely revamped media manager. Instantly after updating to WordPress 3.5, you will notice that images/media is handled completely different way in this new version. Not only the media library changes, but the way image galleries are created also changed. All these changes are definitely an improvement.
Below you will learn how to create a photo gallery in WordPress posts and pages. The process is really very easy and anyone can insert a photo gallery in minutes, and that too without using any plugins.
Adding Images to Gallery
To get started, click on the “Add Media” button at the top left of your post editor.
When you first open Media Manager, you can start uploading images. You can simply drag and drop all the images that you want for the image gallery. Alternatively, you can also click on the “Select Files” button and then select all the files and upload them. You can upload multiple images by holding down the Shift key and if you want to deselect an image, then press the Ctrl key.
If in case, you don’t want to upload images at this time and you want to use previously uploaded images, then click on “Media Library” and select the files that you want to include in your gallery.
Now, it’s time to select images that you want to upload. Once the images are uploaded, you will be switched over to the Media Library pane where you will be able to see all the media items. From the dropdown menu, you can filter by media uploaded to this post, all media items, images, audio and video.
Selecting and Adding Files to Media Library
Now, it’s time to select items that you want to add to gallery. Hold down the Ctrl key to select individual images and hold down the Shift key to select all the files in the range.
To add meta information about the image, select the image and the active image will have a blue border around it. You will also see a preview of the image in the right side. Add meta information like title, caption, alt text and description.
Creating a Gallery
Now that the images are selected, click on the “Create Gallery” link from the top left side of the screen.
Once you do this, you can see a new button. Click on “Create a new gallery”.
You will be taken to a screen where you can sort images in any order that you like. Simply drag and drop images to reorder them. Click on small X to remove the photo from the gallery.
There’s also a reverse order button to reverse the order of all the images. You can also set number of columns in the gallery.
From the right hand side, you can set links of images to an attachment page (a regular page) or to an image file (where you can see a lightbox image gallery).
Finally, click on “Insert gallery” button. Once you do this, you will see a large image appear in your editor.
Don’t worry, your image gallery is inserted and all you need to do is to click on Publish button.
This is how your gallery will look like in front-end, looks good, right.
To edit the gallery, click on the gallery image and you will see two icons. Click on the left icon to edit the gallery.
One thing’s for sure, image gallery in WordPress 3.5 is far more usable than previous versions. Another advantage of using this method is that you don’t need to use any plugin for inserting gallery. Do try it out and let us know your opinion on this improved feature of WordPress.
Yes I like the new media uploader with gallery support FINALLY!!! It was very difficult to show clients how to insert galleries until now.
The only thing I am disappointed about the gallery is that there is no lightbox support yet. They don’t need to go all out. It should be in that dropdown where it asks where the Image links go. ie. Attachment Page, Media URL, Lightbox.
Agree with you. That would be a nice solution. But if I am right, then the default 2012 theme does supports lightbox. Try out the gallery with default theme.
Thank you for the tutorial. I have been using wordpress since before the switch to the new media loader and I have a problem that I can’t find a satisfactory answer to in the help forums. When I upload and order images (like you showed above) they appear in the correct order on the main page of the post but if you click on the first image to enlarge it and then click on the “next” button the images appear completely out of order. I never had this problem before. If you encountered this and have any fix-it advice, I would appreciate it!