With WordPress 2.5 the team behind one of the best blog/CMS platforms out there implemented the option to add a “Gallery”. You can now add basic gallery functionality to your theme without needing any extra plugins.

But, if you are writing your blogs posts for someone else, other than on your own blog, make sure that you have the proper privileges to do so. Otherwise you may not be able to “add” a gallery, as I have been unable to show you a working example here.

However, you can see an example here of how this would otherwise normally look once inserted into your blog post.

The procedure is simple. When you go to write a new post, or page, you will see “Add Media” right below the “Title” field. Next to it you will find four icons, one for adding an image, one for adding video, one for adding audio and the last one for adding media.

Uploading Images

You can choose either the “Add Image” or “Add Media” button and proceed to upload your images. The best improvement I feel has been done here. You no longer need to upload one image after another, instead you can do a batch upload. So select all the files you want to place in your gallery, once the window opens to select the images from your system, and click OK.

Your image files should now start uploading, and you can watch the progress as it happens. Another nice improvement by the WordPress team. The upload interface will have three tabs - “Choose File”, “Gallery” and “Media Library”. You should see the “Gallery” showing the number of files you have uploaded. So if you uploaded 6 images, it would say “Gallery (6)”.

Go ahead and click on that tab, and you will see all of your images.

Inserting Gallery Into Post

You can now edit each property of each image like the Title, Caption and Description. Once you are done with it you can then just click on the “Insert gallery into post” option and that should do it.

You will now see something like this in your post area “[ gallery ]”. Go ahead and preview your post now and it should you your gallery in all its glory.

Clicking on each of the images you will see that all of your images now have their own post pages, and people can leave comments too if they like. Make sure that you give proper titles to your images, it may or may not help in getting extra search engine traffic. But since this feature is so new we will not know till it is widely adopted.

Gallery Options

By default the gallery will divide itself into 3 columns. You can however change them by adding a class option like so - “[ gallery columns=”4″ ]”. Now it will be divided into 4 columns.

For more options visit this page to see what else you can do to customize your gallery. Have fun inserting galleries into your posts.