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Galleries

WordPress includes excellent features for publishing photo galleries. Our themes provide a page template that lists all galleries in one place. There are also widgets for displaying galleries.

Galleries Anywhere

You can use WordPress’s Gallery block in your content (pages, posts, sermons, events, locations, etc.). You might want to create a page specifically for a gallery or show a gallery in a blog post, a tour for a location, photos for an event, etc.

Adding a Gallery

  1. When editing content, click the + button to add a Gallery block.
  2.  Click Upload or Media Library to choose images.
  3. Click Create a new gallery.
  4. Optionally drag the images to change their order.
  5. Click Insert Gallery.
  6. Optionally add captions, change the number of columns, etc.
Gallery Block

Adding a gallery to your content

Editing a Gallery

There are several ways you can change your gallery.

  • Click an image then click the X to remove it.
  • Click an image then click “Write caption…” to add a caption.
  • Click your block then look to the right to change columns and other settings.
  • Click your block then click the Edit icon to change or reorder the images.
Editing Gallery

Editing a gallery block

Individual Photos

Titles and Descriptions

You can set a title (uses filename when not changed), caption (one-liner under the photo) and description (full details; longer than the caption) on each photo. You can do this when creating a gallery or by Editing a Gallery (see above). You can also go to Media in the main menu to edit your uploaded photos’ information.

Page or Lightbox

When the user clicks a photo in a gallery, they are taken to a page that shows a large version of the photo along with any title, caption and description you provide. You can optionally show each photo in a lightbox. When a thumbnail is clicked, the large version of the photo will appear in place. We recommend the WP Featherlight plugin (free) if you want gallery lightboxes.

All Galleries Page

You can create a page that lists all galleries existing on the site. This provides an easy way for visitors to browse all of your photos.

  1. Go to Pages > Add New.
  2. Enter a title and any content that you want to appear at the top of the galleries list.
  3. Click Document, then…
  4. Under Template, choose “Galleries” (plural).
  5. Click Publish.
Galleries Template

Adding a page to list your galleries

Excluding Galleries

You can exclude galleries from this page (and the gallery widget) by checking the box under Options for “Exclude from gallery widgets/templates” when adding or editing a page or post that has a gallery.

Gallery Sidebar

When making a regular page with a gallery, set Template to “Gallery” (singular). For themes supporting a sidebar, this will cause the Gallery Sidebar to be used. This way you can show widget specifically relating to galleries.

Note that galleries added to other content (blog posts, locations, events, etc.) will not use this sidebar. Instead, they will use the sidebar matching their own section. For example, a location with a gallery will show the Locations Sidebar instead of the Gallery Sidebar.

Gallery Widgets

You can go to Appearance > Customize > Widgets to use widgets that show galleries and images. There are a couple gallery-related widgets available.

  • CT Galleries – list all pages, posts, etc. that have a gallery
  • CT Gallery – show photos from one or all galleries

The CT Gallery widget is useful for showing the latest photos from all galleries on the Homepage (when your theme supports it).

Read the Widgets guide for more information.

More Information