So here’s what I wanted to do: integrate some sort of nice-looking image gallery into my WordPress blog. Sounds easy: just grab some pictures and make thumbnails, then upload all to some directory, then place the thumbnail images in my post with the href of the link going to the full-sized picture.
But alas, several problems arose:
- I’m a computer geek, but my clients aren’t. I need a user-friendly visual interface type thing so that Joe and Jessica User can make their own galleries without having to size and thumbnail their own images and upload them via FTP and keep track of the image URLs.
- Hand-coding tables and tweaking HTML in WordPress is a pain, so a documented, maintained program that does the formatting would be ideal.
I wanted to make a table of thumbnail images and make each full-size image come up in an unobtrusive div or something like Lightbox does, but making tables and integrating the Lightbox stuff just didn’t seem to do the trick. So I found Alex Rabe’s NextGEN Gallery that’s an actual WordPress Plugin that has instructions for installation, configuration, etc. So sweet! As with most things, it does way more than I need and thus it takes some tweaking to make it fit my purposes, but the end result is quite acceptable.
So, here’s the result: some photos of castles from when Ginger and I went to Europe in 2006:
Thanks soooooooooooooooooo much for this great post. This was just what I needed today.