Showcase Your Images with Galleries

We recently announced changes to the Media Manager, which is designed to make it easier to upload images, audio, and video files to your site and edit their attributes.

Galleries and the Carousel

We highly encourage you to display your images in a gallery. Our different gallery styles showcase your collections of images professionally, and when you click on an image in a gallery, you can view its larger size in a full-size carousel. In the carousel, your readers can comment on individual images, and you can opt to display the metadata for all of your images — which is valuable info for photographers, camera hobbyists, and anyone interested in learning more about your images.

You can insert a gallery with the default thumbnail grid layout, as seen in German photographer Sven Seebeck’s galleries of landscapes and nature photography. Sven’s stunning images of coastal Cornwall in England and Norway’s Lofoten Islands are worth a peek.

Tiled Galleries

If you haven’t already, we hope you’ve tested out our tiled mosaic-style layout galleries, which showcase your images with square, rectangular, or circle-shaped thumbnails. Sven switches to the square tiled layout in some of his posts, as seen in “A Belated Postcard from Vienna.”

Likewise, the travel post “Framing Sri Lanka” at I Am Wanderful illustrates how a square tiled gallery beautifully displays a collection of images:

I Am Wanderful

As for a great example of the rectangular gallery, Jonathan Chater’s recent “Travel Photography (2009-2011)” post does the trick:

Jonathan Chater

If you visit the blogs mentioned above and hover over the images in these square and rectangular tiled galleries, you’ll notice the captions that pop up along the bottom border of the images, which are nice touches.

Finally, the circle gallery offers a different look, as seen in this “Gallery of Elsewhere”:

Writing Through the Fog

To switch from the default setting to the tiled gallery layout, go to Settings → Media in your dashboard, scroll down to “Image Gallery Carousel,” and checkmark the box next to “Display all your gallery pictures in a cool mosaic.” Selecting this option makes the rectangular layout the default for all of your blog’s galleries, including those you’ve previously inserted.

You can also manage gallery styles individually. In Settings → Media, leave the box unchecked next to “Display all your gallery pictures in a cool mosaic.” Then, you can insert the appropriate gallery shortcode on individual posts or pages while in text edit mode:

[gallery type=”square”]

[gallery type=”rectangular”]

[gallery type=”circle”]

Be sure to read our gallery support page for more details.

Carousel View

When you click on an image in any gallery on a blog at WordPress.com, you’re taken to the gallery’s full-size carousel view, which presents images as large as your display can contain them. You can enable the carousel on your blog, and customize its settings, at Settings → Media as well:

You can customize the background color — black or white — and opt to show the available metadata for the images in a collection.

We hope you enjoy the new Media Manager and use these gallery and carousel features to showcase your images. We’ll also highlight more great blogs using the galleries soon!

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