Most people know you can use the standard WordPress gallery shortcode to make a gallery in a post or page, but the styling of it is at best, basic. Celestial takes advantage of the Cleaner Gallery plugin by Justin Tadlock, in combination with the WordPress shortcode…and a little bit of Celestial styling.
Part 1 – Get the Cleaner Gallery plugin
- Go to Plugins >> Add New
- Search for “Cleaner Gallery“, click install, then activate
- Go to Appearance >> Cleaner Gallery
- For the following settings we will set them as:
- Display: Thumbnail
- Images should link to: Full
- Uncheck the Load Cleaner Gallery Stylesheet
- Select an image script to use with your galleries: Lightbox
- Click “Update Settings“
Part 2 – Create Your Galleries
- Create a post or page for your gallery (or open an existing post or page you want your gallery in)
- Switch the editor to the HTML (Text) view and add the WordPress shortcode:
- Switch back to the Visual view on the editor at which point you should now see something like this:
- Click on the gallery area and then click the “edit” image icon.
- Start adding photos by uploading a set, add captions if you wish, and alt tags
- When you save and publish your gallery page, you won’t see the images in the editor, but you will on the front of your site.
NOTE: To view the images in a lightbox, refer to the “Add a Lightbox to your website” setup tutorial which uses the Lightbox Plus plugin. With the Cleaner Gallery, a popup window will look like this: