Showcase Your Images with Galleries
We recently announced changes to the Media Manager, which is designed to make it easier to upload images, audio, and video files to your site and edit their attributes.
Galleries and the Carousel
We highly encourage you to display your images in a gallery. Our different gallery styles showcase your collections of images professionally, and when you click on an image in a gallery, you can view its larger size in a full-size carousel. In the carousel, your readers can comment on individual images, and you can opt to display the metadata for all of your images — which is valuable info for photographers, camera hobbyists, and anyone interested in learning more about your images.
You can insert a gallery with the default thumbnail grid layout, as seen in German photographer Sven Seebeck’s galleries of landscapes and nature photography. Sven’s stunning images of coastal Cornwall in England and Norway’s Lofoten Islands are worth a peek.
Tiled Galleries
If you haven’t already, we hope you’ve tested out our tiled mosaic-style layout galleries, which showcase your images with square, rectangular, or circle-shaped thumbnails. Sven switches to the square tiled layout in some of his posts, as seen in “A Belated Postcard from Vienna.”
Likewise, the travel post “Framing Sri Lanka” at I Am Wanderful illustrates how a square tiled gallery beautifully displays a collection of images:
As for a great example of the rectangular gallery, Jonathan Chater’s recent “Travel Photography (2009-2011)” post does the trick:
If you visit the blogs mentioned above and hover over the images in these square and rectangular tiled galleries, you’ll notice the captions that pop up along the bottom border of the images, which are nice touches.
Finally, the circle gallery offers a different look, as seen in this “Gallery of Elsewhere”:
To switch from the default setting to the tiled gallery layout, go to Settings → Media in your dashboard, scroll down to “Image Gallery Carousel,” and checkmark the box next to “Display all your gallery pictures in a cool mosaic.” Selecting this option makes the rectangular layout the default for all of your blog’s galleries, including those you’ve previously inserted.
You can also manage gallery styles individually. In Settings → Media, leave the box unchecked next to “Display all your gallery pictures in a cool mosaic.” Then, you can insert the appropriate gallery shortcode on individual posts or pages while in text edit mode:
[gallery type=”square”]
[gallery type=”rectangular”]
[gallery type=”circle”]
Be sure to read our gallery support page for more details.
Carousel View
When you click on an image in any gallery on a blog at WordPress.com, you’re taken to the gallery’s full-size carousel view, which presents images as large as your display can contain them. You can enable the carousel on your blog, and customize its settings, at Settings → Media as well:
You can customize the background color — black or white — and opt to show the available metadata for the images in a collection.
We hope you enjoy the new Media Manager and use these gallery and carousel features to showcase your images. We’ll also highlight more great blogs using the galleries soon!
Brilliant and I look forward to giving them a try. Have a great weekend!
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I LOVE the tiled layout. It makes all of my posts look so much more polished!
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I used yesterday! It’s far more efficient than ever. I get to isolate one gallery to another, something I’ve waiting for WP to upgrade. Now, I don’t have to use an external collage app. Thanks WP geniuses! 😀
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Ooh la lah! Gorgeous! And immensely appealing, too!
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Aesthetic and practical–thank you!
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Introduction of Tiled Galleries is one of my favorite wordpress feature updates, and the changes to media manager just makes it more awesome 🙂 Sharing pictures have never been this easy. Way to go WordPress!!!
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Do these work with YouTube/Vimeo videos (via embed code) as well, or just still photos?
Thanks.
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In order to use this function you have to upload to WordPress and not use URLs, correct?
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Yes, that is correct.
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The new media manager is horrible for uploading from Flickr or other photo storage sites. Didn’t make it easier at all.
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Love this feature. Am trying this very soon. 😀
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Reblogged this on The Considered Kula and commented:
I love all of these new WordPress Gallery options. It makes me wish I had more yoga images to “showcase” (has that been verbed?) I need to buy a new camera.
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Thank you, but I’m confused, what images and how would I get them in a gallery, it sounds interesting but to what end?
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You can upload your own images to your blog, to a post or a page. You can do this using the Add Media button when you’re working on a new post. The steps to add a gallery are here. People use galleries for different reasons, but for many, it’s a great way to show off a set of images on your blog. You can also simply insert images directly into the post, but this is a great method to showcase them in an organized, professional way.
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finally!! thanks so much for this *two thumbs up*
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Its great but flawed in one simple feature: it does not allow linking to external URLs and must load the carousel of media uploaded to wordpress. Sometimes (ok often) you want to showcase a gallery of other peoples images but to use the gallery feature you have to upload copies of their work onto wordpress – thumbnails would be fine, but copying other peoples images without linking explicitly to their work is not particularly acceptable.
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Very cool! I look forward to trying this out…
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Love the galleries. Best upgrade yet! 🙂
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I’ve just set up my galleries and I really love this enhancement it works brilliantly, thank you!
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Nicely done!
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Reblogged this on CreativePro and commented:
One of the many attributes of WordPress that I find simply brilliant!
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Love! Can’t wait to try the circle gallery, it’ll look awesome, I’m sure!
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Congratulations! You have poked holes in my last five years of blogging which sometimes uses photos from other sites accessed by their urls. They do not display any more.
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Looks like a great feature for someone in the photography business!
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Thank-you! – this kind of input is extremely helpful to an old codger who doesn’t really have a clue … Anything re creative formatting is very welcome.
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I’ve been meaning to add a gallery since I set up my blog months ago. In fact, as I use the blog to showcase my etchings & paintings, it could well be the most important feature. Glad to see it has been made easier. I should sort it out pronto!
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Thanks a lot for this helpful and great update!
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Thanks for this post – I’ve been trying to work out how to do the tiled mosaic look! I just turned it on and it looks great – way better than before. Thanks! Candice
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Thanks for this. I just began adding an embedded graphic with one post. A couple days ago, on another new post, I tried to add a “”quicktime” .mov version of a short book trailer. I learned going through the various wordpress menus, that I needed to “upgrade” in order to do this. Has that changed?
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To upload video files from your computer for hosting and playback directly within your blog, yes, you need a VideoPress upgrade.
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I found out that you can link an image that you have uploaded from a site back to their site by filling in the Attachment Display Settings box that says “Link to”. That solves that problem. When someone clicks on the image it takes them to the link you’ve entered there. I love ths new set-up. Thanks WordPress! 🙂
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Reblogged this on Marsha Lee and commented:
I’m reblogging this partly for my own use, making it easier to find, but also some of you may not have read it, and I’ve had questions from readers myself. Enjoy!
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I’ve tried the rectangular one and it was amazing. It gave a new dimension to the page layout. I love it.
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Thank you so much, for the great idea, in order to post images now, it looks much better and gives a nice clean layout ; I like it a lot.
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This is great? Can we possibly get a better slideshow feature? A few examples would be babble.com, newsone.com…etc.
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Hi Lee — at the moment, you can display your slideshows on a post or page by typing the shortcode [slideshow] into the Text window. You can find more detailed instructions on our slideshow support page.
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Very cool! I can’t wait to try them out.
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I like the gallery feature, however, is it possible to open up a page after clicking a picture (in the gallery) vs. displaying the image in a larger view?
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Thanks for posting this. When this capability first came out, there was an intro and “how to”, but I didn’t get it. Your info here finally got me going. I’ve got a post in draft ready for tomorrow. Thanks again!
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Very nice, but still one big wish to you…geotagging of photos, so you can see on a map where the picture has been taken.
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Thanks! A great feature, especially rectangular.
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Fantastic! Thank you for making the Gallery so much easier and more fun to use! No more complicated re-ordering, just click and grab – fab!
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Reblogged this on cameras.and.clutches and commented:
I think it’s always handy to know how you are able to showcase your pictures on your blog!
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When my blog was in full-width, the collage-format gallery works just perfectly fine. Then I decided to put my footer widget to the right and the gallery no longer works, only showing one picture. Now, I’m forced to post the picture one by one. 😦
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Goody, goody, goody! A brilliant Christmas present from WordPress: can’t wait to try this. No more external machinations to wrestle with – hurrah!
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I just tried using the cirlce style gallery for a post on my blog. I am thrilled with the results. The post goes up next week. Can’t wait to see the response 🙂
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Reblogged this on welcome to mayuy's blog.. cheers! 🙂.
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Can we really create individualized galleries in the same post? That would be awesome as I’d love to use our galleries more often. TY! 🙂
Eliz
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I just used the circular layout for a gallery for this week’s photo challenge and I am so happy with the results. It is a wonderful layout!
Check out my post: http://beyondbeautytips.wordpress.com/2012/12/15/weekly-photo-challenge-delicate/
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I love the rectangle tiled mosaic-style layout gallery but as I draw comic strips on my blog and usually only upload 1 picture per post, I didn’t really have a chance to try it out.
Well, that is until today when I took some photos of my doodle designs and arranged it in the new layout gallery. It is looking fabulous!
I really like the nice touch of pop up captions at the bottom of the images but I didn’t go with it cause my images already have a title and it appears weird to me to have both pop ups when my mouse hovers at the image. It could be just me…
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Yes, I agree, the gallery posts showing as a mosaic look very professional and polished. I’m using the rectangular layout and will stay with that placement. One thing I have added is a brief description against each image; one can do that when creating the gallery and it makes the show much more interesting IMHO! :O) Thanks WordPress, you rock!
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I would never have considered using circular photos – but now I can’t get the idea out of my mind. Very cool option. Thanks.
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Very nice & interesting. Can’t wait to try this.
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The updates to the galleries are great and much more user friendly. Thanks!
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Reblogged this on Lie or Break.
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Thank you for this post – this advice has made my gallery (and thus my site) look far better than the thumbnails there previously – much appreciated.
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