Gallery

Media

Images » Gallery

Gallery Styles
Adding a Gallery or Slideshow
Editing a Gallery or Slideshow
Gallery Shortcode
Manage Gallery Styles Individually
Examples of Gallery Styles
Troubleshooting

Image galleries on WordPress.com are a great way to share your pictures with your friends, family, and your followers. An image gallery will display a set of small images attached to a particular post or page. Readers can click on any image to launch a full-size carousel that allows them to scroll through the entire gallery one image at a time. With the slideshow option, images will automatically move from one to the next after a few seconds.

Gallery Styles

You have three choices for how a gallery will be displayed in your post: a thumbnail grid layout, a tiled mosaic-style layout, or in a slideshow. All sites default to the thumbnail grid style. You can also style each gallery individually.

Tiled layouts can display in one of three styles: rectangular tiles, square tiles, or circular tiles. Along with looking great, the rectangular and square tiled layouts also have hover-over captions to save space while making captions accessible. (Check out examples of all three layout options in this post.)

To switch to tiled layouts from the default, head over to Settings → Media in your blog’s dashboard, scroll down to “Image Gallery Carousel,” and select the box next to “Display all your gallery pictures in a cool mosaic.” Note that choosing this option makes this layout the default for all your blog’s galleries, including those you’ve previously inserted.

When clicked, gallery images are displayed in a full-size carousel view, which you can customize from the Image Galleries Carousel section of the Media Settings.

Below is an example of an image gallery using the default thumbnail setting. If you click on any of the images you will be able to see what the carousel view looks like:

: Alley flowers

: Avenue

: St. Stephen’s Basilica

: Ceiling of Széchenyi Baths

: Széchenyi Chain Bridge

: Chess set at Vásárcsarnok Market

: Nighttime walk

: Statues

: Castle Hill Tunnel

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Adding a Gallery or Slideshow

Open a post or page for editing. If it is a new post or page, make sure to add a title and save it at least once before trying to insert a gallery or slideshow.
Click the Add Media button.
Click Create Gallery at the top left.
To add images from your hard drive, drag and drop your files into the box that appears, or click Select Files to choose a picture from your computer to upload.
After the images have finished uploading, you will be shown all the images in your Media Library. Select any additional images you’d like to include in your gallery or slideshow by clicking on them.

To select multiple images, command-click (Mac) or control-click (PC) the ones you want to use.
Click Create a new gallery at the bottom right.
On the following screen, click on each image to edit its title, caption, alternate text, and description. (Only the caption will be displayed for the slideshow gallery type.) You can also click and drag photos to re-order them as you like, or choose the Reverse Order or Random Order options:
Choose how you want the gallery to be displayed in the Gallery Settings area:
- Link to:
  - Attachment Page: A specialized page in your blog that shows the image in your selected theme.
  - Media File: A direct link to the full-size uploaded image.
  - The “Link to” option does not apply to slideshows.
- Columns: The number of columns of thumbnails to display. This may be affected by your choice of theme, so be sure and test a bit with your current theme. This option does not apply to slideshows.
- Random Order: Check this box to randomize the order of images in your gallery or slideshow. That means the order will change randomly every time the page is loaded.
- Type: Specify the type of gallery here. The options are a default gallery of thumbnail images, a gallery with rectangular tiles, a gallery with square tiles, a gallery with circular tiles, or a slideshow.
When you’ve finished editing your gallery, click Insert gallery.

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Editing a Gallery or Slideshow

Open a post or page with a gallery for editing and make sure that you are in the Visual editing mode.
Click on the gallery and then click the Edit Gallery icon that appears.
The editing screen is similar to the one displayed when first inserting the gallery. As before, you can drag and drop images to reorder them and edit each image’s title, alternative text, caption and description by clicking on the image.
Adjust the Gallery Settings if necessary.
Make sure to click the Update gallery button to save your settings and before you try to update any of the other gallery settings.

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Gallery Shortcode

To use the gallery shortcode, you’ll need to switch to the Text editor. The gallery shortcode can be used in its simplest form like this (and will display the images attached to the post or page):

[gallery]

To insert a tiled gallery, add the relevant shortcode addition after “gallery”:

type=”rectangular”
type=”square”
type=”circle”

To insert a slideshow gallery type, use this shortcode:

[gallery type="slideshow"]

You can also pass other settings with the gallery shortcode.

Option	Description	Choices	Default Setting
columns	Number of columns used to display the images	An integer greater than 0	3
type	Type of image arrangement to display	“rectangular”, “square” or “circle”.	Leave option out for square thumbnail arrangement
link	How each image will be linked	file	file
orderby	How to order the images	ID, menu_order, rand, title + ASC, DESC	menu_order ASC, ID ASC
size	Size of the images to display	thumbnail, medium, large, full	thumbnail
id	The gallery will display images which are attached to that post.	Any post or page ID that has images attached to it	Default is to show the gallery post
include	The gallery will include specific images	comma separated attachment IDs* – include=”23,39,45″	N/A
exclude	The gallery will exclude specific images	comma separated attachment IDs* – exclude=”24,30,43″	N/A

Note: To get an attachment ID for an image, go to your Media Library and click on the title of the image you want. You can find the ID in the URL (the number after post=).

Examples:
[gallery id="402"]
[gallery columns="5" orderby="title DESC, ID ASC"]

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Manage Gallery Styles Individually

You can also manage gallery styles individually. To do so, go to Settings → Media. Under the section Image Gallery Carousel, uncheck the box Display all your gallery pictures in a cool mosaic and click Save, to keep the default thumbnail grid layout across your site.

When you want to include a gallery in a post, insert it as usual and then simply switch over to the Text tab in the post editor and add the code for the gallery style you want to use (see Gallery Shortcodes).

If you do not add a style, it will default to the thumbnail grid layout.

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Examples of Gallery Styles

This is how each type of gallery style looks like. Styling each gallery individually will work only when the checkbox that says “Display all your gallery pictures in a cool mosaic” is unchecked in Settings → Media. For more information on how to style each gallery individually, please see Manage Gallery Styles Individually.

[gallery type="rectangular"]