SEO Image Galleries
Wednesday, May 12th, 2010 10:19 am
Categories: Blog, WordPress Development.
With every custom blog, especially for photographers, I have usually been required to add some kind of image gallery plugin for WordPress. I have tried several, but found them all lacking in one way or another. Some end up in a Flash player, making them hard to customize and invisible on mobile phones. Some are not user-friendly as far as uplaoding images, editing galleries and then insterting the galleries into pages.
While developing the inner workings PhotographyBlogSites.com, I decided to start from scratch and build my own. It has been in somewhat limited release so far as it has been tested on PhotographyBlogSites and put through the ringer on a few recent custom sites that are about to launch.
My goal was to build a comprehensive image gallery plugin that would be easy to use, versatile, visible on mobile phones, and highly customizable. I also wanted to add the all important SEO information to each and every image using file names, ALT and Title attributes and even the folder structure of where the images were stored to really push the SEO quality of every gallery.
Where to Get it
You can find more technical details as well as how to use the plugin here:
This plugin is hosted at WordPress, so you can search for it and auto-install into any WordPress site, or you can download it from WordPress.
Example of how it can be used…
Directly embedded on a page, with the default white display:
This is the small size. For full width photoblogs, it can display at 920px wide.
And using the alternate skin, ‘black’:
A thumbnail that opens full screen:
With the default white display:
Wordpress Development
And the skin ‘black’:
Wordpress Development
A thumbnail list of every Gallery:
With the latest version, you can even add an automated album of every gallery you create, or list an album of any category of galleries.
You can see an example of the album idea in action at the demo site for PhotographyBlogSites.com.
And here is a quick screenshot showing the thumbnails, each linking to a gallery…
And here is a screenshot of the custom display in the overlay window…
If you like that demo site and are a photographer, check out the main site – PhotographyBlogSites.com and sign up for our mailing list.
Custom Image Galleries
This plugin is incredibly easy to customize with basic knowledge of CSS. I have put together some detailed instructions and would love to see any examples of custom galleries using this plugin.
In the next week or two I will be launching two new custom blogs with Identity Kitchen which are the first two sites to use the custom options to the full advantage. Once they are live I will do another post about the custom possibilities.
i have used it it works fine but the problem is that its arrow for next and previous imaegs dont work?
any idea?
The arrows are not for the next image. They advance the thumbnails when there a lot of them. Try uploading about 20 or so images and you will see how that works.