The best gallery software for WordPress (hint: it’s not Gallery2!) [updated 2006/04/17]
I’ve more or less got my site how I like it; there’s little tweaking left to do. After experimenting with numerous themes, plugins, gallery softwares, etc, I’m pretty happy with what I’ve (finally) found works best. Namely, WordPress and the Hemingway theme for it, and the Flickr Photo Album and jPortfolio plugins to integrate my Flickr account into my site. This software stack rules. And it’s all free.
The photo gallery options out there are numerous and very frustrating. Virtually none of them integrates with WordPress in any satisfactory way. For a month now I’ve tried various options, settling on Gallery2, a solid image gallery for sure, but I’ve recently given up in frustration. Using the WordPress-Gallery2 bridge scripts has resulted in an error-prone website (try enabling path rewriting in wp-gallery2 to see what i mean) that has really ugly site-design-breaking non-integration with wordpress. I’ve also come across no desireable themes for Gallery2, save PGtheme, which looks neat, but destroys all html standards compliance, has endless, confusingly named configuration options, etc. And through no fault of PGtheme, it made my ‘embedded’ Gallery2 page stick out like a sore thumb. And all this sits atop Gallery2 which has far too many configuration options, and mediocre layout and usability.
Side note: Someone really strong in graphic design should tackle the user interface, layout, icons, logo, etc, of Gallery2 and pare it down to a simple, aesthetically pleasing, small software package (Gallery2 is currently 20+MB uncompressed) with sane defaults (ie: no visual clutter, uneccessary information, stuff no one cares about, etc.). Don’t make me do it, people!
But the nightmare is over: Gallery2/WPG2 is uninstalled, and all is right with the world. Why am I so happy? Two reasons: the jPortfolio and Flickr Photo Album plugins. Both are brand spanking new. Both allow me to do exactly what I always wanted with my photos. Easily. Beautifully. Instantly.
I use jPortfolio to show small square thumbs of recent photos from Flickr on the ‘footer’ (lower) section of this site. I very easily specify how many images to show, their dimensions, and when clicked on, the ubiquitous and clever Lightbox javascript dims the page and loads the image selected on top. Neat!
The Flickr Photo Album plugin allows me to create a virtual page, which when called, loads thumbnails from my Flickr account (cached locally of course) and displays them flawlessly integrated into my site. So flawlessly, in fact, you’d have no idea the images are on flickr.com, not stimuli.ca. And my Flickr albums are preserved, to boot! No scattering unrelated images all over the gallery page. [edit: I've tweaked Flickr Album to work with Hemingway better. Get it here.]
If you’re a WordPress user looking for a sane, easy to use method of integrating photos and images into your blog, you owe it to yourself to check these plugins out. They are the icing on the WordPress cake of fun!
Thanks for the great comments about jPortfolio. I’m glad to see people using it. More features will be coming soon :)
On a side note I wanted to point out that you could very easily setup your gallery pages using jPortfolio as well, using only a few tags. You could even make it a tad better in that if desired oyu oculd easily make the main image for each gallery a random image from that set.
I’m going to be setting up very similiar pages on my site and they will be done with jPortfolio. For the most part I could make a gallery page 99% identical to those you have there with 2 jport quicktags in a static page, plus 1 more quicktag for each additional gallery link.
Spiffy! I have no idea how those quicktags work, but if and when I do figure out how to use them (I’m retarded, I know) I will be happy as a clam, as I am using free Flickr and am thus limited to only 3 albums… boo! hiss!
Man, actually what led me to try it was the super cool mod you made to the lightbox. Are you gonna share that?
got it… I was using lightbox version 1.
Lightbox 2 has the mods you want… I just inverted the images in photoshop (white -> black, and vice versa)
Hey the Lightbox mods are great. But I noticed if I insert a photo inline in a post, the generated HTML doesn’t insert rel=”lightbox”. Do you know why?
And I really liked it when the original Joe Tan version displayed individual photos on their own pages and show comments from Flickr. Is there anyway to still leave that functionality in, like display the comments on the lighted photo instead of ‘Image xx of xx’ on the lower left part? If I understood more about Lightbox I’d attempt to do that myself.
Still thanks so much for this tremendous plugin!
Sorry.. clarification: the lightbox functionality works when viewing the post on it’s own page, but clicking on the photo if it’s on the home page doesn’t work cos the ‘rel=lightbox’ portion is left out somehow. You can see it on my home page. Any help?
My link is bad: it’s http://victortoh.japanccc.org
Hi Victor,
Both issues you mention are on my to-do list.
I’ll see if I can solve the posted-pictures issue first, and then take a look at the Lightbox JS. Tan Tan’s got all the functionality, I just have to figure a way to hack it into playing with Lightbox better.
Also, there’s CSS issues with IE on PC; the page always shows up with the pictures hugging the left side of the screen. Sadly, I don’t have a PC to test in, so that one may take a while.