The Best WordPress Gallery Plugin

Hey, guess what? The best WordPress gallery plug-in out there is not even a plugin!

For years, managing collections of images in a WordPress blog post required a plug-in. NextGen was one of the most popular plug-ins around but there was no shortage of alternatives.

I’m not a big fan of using Plugins. Sure, they allow you to customize your blog in unique ways, but they also require a lot of attention in the form of keeping them up to date. It may not be an issue when you manage just one or two blogs, but when you run a few dozens or more, trust me, you want to keep updating to the absolute minimum. What’s more, plugin developers sometimes give up on the project, leaving you stuck with a plugin that eventually stops working with some new WP version. Been there, done that…

If a feature is important enough to enough bloggers it needs to be incorporated into WordPress itself and eventually, almost always, it does become an integral part of the script.

I always felt that the ability to add galleries to your posts was an important feature. Over the years, I’ve tried a bunch of different gallery plugins with various results, but now, finally, no more plugins!

Having tested it in several blogs, I am perfectly happy with the WordPress gallery feature. Here’s how you use it -

1. Upload more than one image to your post – just use the “insert image” button as usual. Either add one image after the other, or select multiple images by holding down the CTRL key.

2. Once you have your images uploaded and saved WordPress automatically creates a gallery tab for you:

3. You can click the Show link next to each one and edit the file name, alt text and description. The little box next to that link is for you to order images in the gallery if you wish to.

4. The gallery settings at the bottom allow you to control where the images lead to when clicked. Here’s the real cool feature – you can automatically create a page for each picture in your gallery, complete with your full template, comments and everything else that you get from WordPress.

5. Finally, set up the order in which you want your images displayed and the number of gallery columns and voila – insert the new gallery into your post:

As you can see from the above gallery, every image that you upload to your post will be included in the gallery. I still haven’t found a way to easily exclude images from the gallery, unless you actually upload them to another post or page and then just link to them there. I guess the wonderful people who code WP still have some work to do there.

However, I think it’s the best gallery generator for WordPress I have found so far, and hey, it’s a “Look, Ma! No Plugins!” moment!

I’d love to hear from those who have tried this feature. How do you feel it compares to existing gallery plug-ins? And if you’re not using it, care to share why?