This guide will show you how to add a gallery to your Managed WordPress Website using NextGEN Gallery by Photocrati.
By default NextGEN Gallery is activated on your website. You can see the options on the admin menu labelled under Gallery. There are a number of options each fairly self explanatory. We will use default settings in this example. If you want to try different layouts and formats you can modify those settings. This also includes adding a custom watermark to all your images automatically.
Adding a Gallery and Images
1. First log into your Managed WordPress website.
2. Click on Gallery > Overview. This details how many images, galleries and albums you have.
3. Click on Gallery > Add Gallery / Images menu. Here you can now create a new gallery and add files, or select an existing gallery and add files. For our example, we will create a new gallery.
4. Enter a name for the new gallery. In our example the name is Awesome Gallery. Immediately click the Add Files button.
5. In the box that appears choose the images you want to add from your computer and click OK/Open button. The images will now be listed.
6. Click the Start Upload button. The files are now being uploaded. You will notice an indicator stating how many files are uploaded and remaining to upload. Once completed you will get a notification and the screen will reset so you can add more if you wish.
7. Click Gallery > Manage Galleries. Now you can see your new gallery and how many images are added to it. In our example Awesome Gallery contains 8 images.
8. If you click the Gallery name you can then edit the Gallery properties and image properties. This includes assigning an Alt & Title Text / Description to the images. This is important for SEO so it is recommended that you do complete this. You can find our members only guide at http://www.hostingphotography.com/clients/dl.php?type=d&id=6 which will help you determine what to enter.
9. Make all of the changes you wish and click the button Save Changes (at the bottom of the page).
Displaying a Gallery on a Page
Now that you have a gallery added you need to display it on a page so visitors to your website can see it. This example will assume that you already have a page created. Our example page is called Awesome Gallery Page.
1. With your page opened in edit mode, click the green icon on the editor toolbar.
2. Choose a display type. In this example we will choose NextGEN Pro Thumbnail Grid.
3. Open the next option What would you like to display? just below the display type options.
4. We will choose Galleries as our Source. Click in the Galleries input box and a menu will appear with all your Galleries listed. In our example we will choose Awesome Gallery
5. We move to Customize the display settings and leave them all as default. You can change these if you wish.
6. We will not sort our exclude images in this example, but we could if we wanted too.
7. Click the Save button. You will now have an image thumbnail on the page in the editor. This represents the NextGEN gallery.
8. Publish the page and view it. You will see now that the images in the gallery are displayed as Thumbnails. Clicking on a thumb will load the larger image.
That's it. All done.
More Options?
There are many more options in NextGEN, like assigning a price list to sell products or digital downloads for your images. These will be covered in other guides in the near future.
To find out more about Pholioweb, Hosting Photography's Managed WordPress, visit http://www.hostingphotography.com/managed-wordpress-hosting/
You can also get in touch with us for more advice or with any questions you may have at https://www.hostingphotography.com/clients/contact.php