With more than a million active installs and more than 10 million downloads, NextGEN Gallery is undoubtedly the most popular gallery plugin for WordPress. However, if you are a beginner to NextGEN, you may find the plugin a bit confusing.
That’s why we have decided to create a tutorial on how to use NextGEN Gallery. In today’s post, I will show you how to use the NextGEN Gallery WordPress plugin to create awesome galleries.
Creating a Gallery
First of all, download, install and activate NextGEN Gallery in your website. At this point, you should have a new menu item titled ‘Gallery’ in your website dashboard. Go to Gallery > Add Gallery/Images to create a new gallery.
Provide a name for your gallery and click the ‘Add Files’ button to start adding the files. You can also drag the images or a zipped archive of images to the upload area. Click ‘Start Upload’ to start the uploading process.
If you want to import images that are already uploaded to your website server, click the ‘Import Folder’ link, select your desired folder and click ‘Import’.
Once the uploading is finished, you will get a pop-up notice saying ‘Upload complete’. At this point, you have successfully created an image gallery with NextGEN Gallery.
Editing Galleries
To view a list of the galleries, go to Gallery > Manage Galleries.
Clicking on a gallery name will take you to the editing screen for that gallery. The editing page will have two separate sections, one for the gallery and the other for the images of the gallery. From the first section, you can change the gallery name, description, set preview image, etc.
Below, you will find a list of all the images for that gallery. Each image will show a thumbnail, image name and the image size. Hovering over each image will reveal additional options including view, rotate, delete, edit thumb, etc. By checking multiple images, you can apply bulk actions like setting watermarks, resizing images, deleting images, rotate, copy, move, add, delete or overwrite tags, etc. After making all the changes, click ‘Save Changes’.
Creating Albums
You can also create albums by combining multiple galleries. To add a new album, go to Gallery > Manage Albums. Provide the album name in the ‘Add new album’ field and click ‘Add’. Select the gallery, drag and drop it under the newly created album name. Then, click the ‘Update’ button. It is also possible to delete an album by selecting it and then clicking the ‘delete’ button.
Setting up the Gallery
In order to set up various options of the plugin, check out the Gallery > Gallery Settings and Gallery > Other Options pages. These pages will allow you to customize how the basic thumbnails and basic slideshow will look, set the single image view, thumbnail options, lightbox effect, watermarks, roles and capabilities, etc.
You will find detailed explanations about various setting options in the official help page of NextGEN Gallery.
Displaying the Gallery
In order to display the gallery, go to your post editor. On that page, you will find a new button titled ‘Add NextGEN Gallery to Post’. Clicking on that button will open a new pop-up window. Select the display type from the available styles.
Then, select the gallery or album from the ‘What would you like to display?’ section. Select album or gallery from the sources field. Select the gallery from the ‘Galleries’ section. Customize any other option you want and then, click ‘Save’.
After making all the changes, save the post and preview it. Your gallery should be working perfectly.
Final Words
So, that is how you use NextGEN Gallery to create and display an awesome gallery in your website. Let me know if you want to know anything else about the plugin. I will try my best to help you.
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