Video:

Transcript:

In this video, we're going to take a look at another feature of the media library and that's image 
galleries. Earlier we built a page for the aquarium and we didn't put anything on it. Well, in this 
video we're going to make a really cool photo gallery.
So here at the top, in the admin bar, we can click edit page and then click add media. Now the first 
thing I'm going to do, click upload files, I'm going to click all of my files from my trip to the 
aquarium and click open. Now I have five new images uploaded and I'm going to click create gallery 
here on the left. Now it's still showing all my images but it's only going to create a gallery with 
the images that are checked. I don't want one in the gallery, I can uncheck it. I want it back in, 
I recheck it.
So now on the bottom right I'm going to click create new gallery and now I'm actually making the 
gallery. What I was doing before is choosing what images I wanted in the gallery but now I'm 
creating it. You can have captioned images in the gallery but you don't have to. You can choose what 
happens when people click on the images. We're going to choose media file. You can choose how many 
columns - we'll leave it at 3 for now. You can choose to have them in random order or this order. If 
you want to change this order, you simply drag them and then there's size. We can choose thumbnail, 
medium, large or full size.
Let's start with thumbnail. Now we click insert gallery and it looks like that in the editor but it 
doesn't look like that on the front end. So let's hit update and then view the page. It looks like 
this, which is a little awkward, but you can, I could, get the large images. So I don't really like 
the way this looks, so I go back and I can click this pencil over my gallery and I can say I want 
medium. Update and reload my page and that looks quite a bit better. That's still a little odd, so 
I click the pencil again and I say I want just two columns and update and reload. That looks a bit 
better.
Now one of the really great things about WordPress photo galleries is that, while they're very 
simple, they are extremely extendable. There are dozens of plugins that can do wonderful things with 
this gallery. They can make slideshows, they can make zoom effects, all sorts of things. Let's put 
it in random order and I want to show you what's actually going on behind the scenes. Here we see 
the images, here in a gallery, but if we click text you'll see that it's just this bit of text 
called a shortcode. It says it's a gallery that we're linking to the file, the sizes, medium to 
columns, the post IDs of the images and how we want it ordered. So now if we reload, the order 
changes every time we load. This may be good, it may be annoying. You need to gauge based on what 
your readers like.
One of my favorite gallery extenders comes with the jetpack plugin and we did an entire series on 
jetpack that includes how to make your galleries look great.
So, if you're excited about galleries, I strongly recommend you watch the jetpack series and learn 
about their built in galleries.