Lightbox Gallery is a WordPress plugin by Hiroaki Miyashita that allows you to set up thumbnail photos which, when the viewer clicks them, appear as lightbox images.
Ever since WordPress 2.5, it has been possible to make a gallery on a page by using the shortcode tag [ gallery ].
By the way, the tag should not have a space either side of the word ‘gallery’ but I have put a space either side in the tag so that it doesn’t operate to create a gallery here on this page.
What the Lightbox Gallery plugin does is to automatically convert the default gallery view into the lightbox view. In my opinion this makes for a much nicer looking layout.
You may not be familiar with the term lightbox but I am sure you have seen images displayed this way on the web. Take a look at my new Street Works photographs page and you will see what I mean.
Using the plugin you can set the number of columns of thumbnails (I chose 3 columns) and you can if you wish override the standard thumbnail size that is set in WordPress in the Settings > Media admin page.
You can also set up more than one gallery by naming each gallery with shortcode.
The plugin gets about 150 downloads per day, so although it is not one of the runaway success stories of WordPress plugins, it has enough downloads for any problems to have surfaced and be commented upon.
I upgraded Photograph Works to the newly released WordPress 3.0 version last night and the Lightbox Gallery plugin is working fine with the upgrade.
The Street Works gallery is a collection of human interest photographs taken where I have observed people being themselves in some situation or other.
Street photography is a genre that has photojournalism at one end of its spectrum and simple voyeurism at the other end. Somewhere in the mix there is a whatever makes a photograph interesting where the subject is in the public arena and does not know he or she is being photographed.
I plan to add more photos to the gallery shortly. If you want to keep up with the changes, you can subscribe to this blog via this link.
Street Works is one of three galleries here on Photograph Works. The other two are Flowers and Portraits and you can find them all via these links or from the top navigation bar under the heading Photo Galleries.
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Looks like a good resource for generating on the fly galleries. As a jobbing photographer, this is something we do a lot. Anything that makes the process easier has to be a good thing.
A great help, it seems to me, I think can help any photographer with some tips of this type. I never tire of reading …
David, I’m going to be switching over to Wordpress and I need a way to insert galleries into my new blog. My question is this: can I do a batch upload of 20 images all at once with this plugin, or do I need to add images one at a time? And do I need to type in code for each gallery, or is the gallery automatically generated through the control panel? Thank you.
The short answer is I don’t know. I created the gallery by creating the page or post and typing the shortcode. It is so easy to do – just a very short piece of code like this: [ gallery ] (only without the spaces). As for the images, I uploaded them singly because I normally do that and I didn’t look to see whether bulk uploading is possible. Take a look at the support page for that gallery plugin and the wordpress codex – that should give you the answers you want.
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