Image galleries are a fun and exciting feature of a church website. These galleries give a personal touch to your site and gives members a better connection to your website. They also can give a visitor a sneak peak into your church, and let them see people instead of just a building and graphics.

This tutorial covers how to install a gallery (if your websites doesn’t have it installed yet), add a gallery, add images, and add a gallery to a page.

Gallery Installation

All new Sharefaith websites have a gallery feature already installed, but if your Sharefaith website doesn’t have it, here’s how to install it. If your website already has a gallery button in your website control panel, then you can skip this section.

    1. Login to your website admin.
    2. Under the Plugin control panel, choose Add New.

  1. Type “NextGEN gallery” in the search box, and click Search.
  2. Click “Install Now” under NextGEN Gallery in the list. (In the description it should say, “By Alex Rabe.”
  3. When it asks if you are sure, click OK.
  4. The plugin should now install. When it is done, click “Activate Plugin”

Recommended Settings

This is not an all inclusive list of recommended settings, but more of a recommendation as to what settings to change from the default install if the gallery was not included with your website. Note: Changing path settings may cause your gallery to not function.

    1. Under the Gallery control panel, choose “Options.”

  1. Under the General Options tab, change the Gallery path to “wp-content/uploads/gallery/” (without quotes). Click Save Changes.
  2. Under the Thumbnails tab, we recommend setting the “Width x height” to 100 and 75. This size will display 4 images wide on your gallery. Click Save Changes.
    (If you want 3 images on a row then set the width and height to 150 and 120.)
  3. Under the Images tab, we recommend checking the box, “Automatically resize images on upload.” This is always a good practice to prevent extremely large images on your website.
  4. Also in the Images tab, we recommend unchecking “Backup original images.” This will prevent your original images from taking up large amounts of storage on your account. Click Save Changes.
  5. Under the Gallery tab, we recommend changing the number of images per page to 24 (or any factor of 4).
  6. Also in the Gallery tab, we recommend unchecking “Integrate slideshow.” Click Save Changes.
  7. Under the Effects tab, the Shutter effect is chosen by default. If you don’t like how it looks when you click on an image, then the Thickbox option is also installed.
  8. Under the Slideshow tab, we recommend setting the size to 516 x 387

Add a Gallery

Before you can add an image you have to have a gallery.

  1. Under the Gallery control panel, choose “Add Gallery / Images.”
  2. Click the tab, “Add new gallery.”
  3. Type the name of the gallery that you want and click “Add gallery.”

Add Images

    1. Under the Gallery control panel, choose “Add Gallery / Images.”

  1. Click the Browse button and select the image(s) you wish to add.
  2. Choose the gallery in the dropdown box where you want to add your image(s).
  3. Click Upload images.

Add a Gallery To a Page

Now that you have your images uploaded an organized into galleries, it is time to make them visible by adding a gallery onto a page.

    1. In the Pages control panel, open the page you want to add the gallery to.
    2. With your editing cursor at the location you want to insert your gallery, click the Add NextGEN Gallery button in the top right corner of the editing bar.

  1. A popup box will appear. Now you can select the Gallery you wish to insert and how you want it to show.

    • Image list – This will create a grid of images on your page.
    • Slideshow – This will create a single image that auto advances (or by click) through the images in your gallery
    • Imagebrowser – This will create a single image with forward and backward arrows to browse through your gallery.
  2. Click Insert

Notes

  • Albums are collections of Galleries, if you want to group galleries together. You don’t need to create Albums.
  • The Gallery control panel has a Style section. There are several different styles that you can activate. We highly discourage changing any code in the edit box.
  • The Gallery control panel has a Roles section. We recommend leaving everything set to Administrator (this is default).
  • You will also see 3 new NextGEN widgets in your Widget control panel. We advise against using them on a church website because of aesthetics and functionality.

Add an Image Slideshow