NextGEN Gallery Tutorial For Beginners
February 10, 2011 
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In this article I’ll show you how to start with the NextGEN Gallery WordPress plugin. NextGEN Gallery is one of the best (free) gallery plugins for WordPress, and in my opinion it is the best. After using it for a couple of my clients, I created this free tutorial because I feel there isn’t that much information about how to start with this plugin.
Overview of this post
- Why use NextGEN?
- Installation, activation and overview of NextGEN
- Add a new gallery
- Uploading images to a gallery
- Displaying a gallery into a page / post
- Examples
- What’s next?
Why use NextGEN?
There are a lot of free gallery plugins for WordPress. Some are better than others. I used several gallery plugins and found out that NextGEN is very good for following reasons:
- Easy to use
- There are a lot of options
- It’s well developed
- The author is constantly making it better
Installation, activation and overview of NextGEN
You can install NextGEN like any other plugin. If you don’t know how to install a plugin then read my previous article “How to install a WordPress plugin“. Be sure to select the right plugin:
Once installed, don’t forget to activate the plugin.
After you’ve activated the NextGEN plugin, you’ll see an extra menu at the left of the dashboard:
Click on “Gallery” > “Overview” in the left menu to get an overview:
In this overview you can see how much Images you uploaded, and how many Galleries and Albums you created.
Add a new gallery
Before we can upload images, we have to create our first gallery.
To add a new gallery go to “Gallery” > “Add Gallery / Images” in the left menu. The following screen will appear:
If you haven’t created a gallery before, then you’re in the right tab (“Add new gallery”). If you allready have created other galleries, then you have to select the “Add new gallery”-tab.
Fill in the name of your new gallery and click the “Add gallery” button.
Uploading images to a gallery
There are 2 ways to upload images to a gallery. You can upload images from a folder on our computer or you can upload a zip-file with images.
Upload images
This is the easiest way to upload images:
- Go to “Gallery” > “Add Gallery / Images”
- Select the “Upload images” tab
- Click the “Browse” button
- Select the images on your computer and click the “Open” button
- Choose a gallery and click the “Upload images” button
Upload a Zip-File
This way we can select 1 zip file containing a lot of images. I’m not a fan of this way of working because depending of your server settings the size of the zip file can be very limited.
To upload a zip file:
- Go to “Gallery” > “Add Gallery / Images”
- Select the “Upload a Zip-file” tab
- Select a zip file on your computer
- Choose you gallery or create a new one (“in to”)
- Click the “Start upload” button
Displaying a gallery into a page / post
After you created a gallery and uploaded some images into that gallery, it’s time to display the gallery into a page or a post:
- Open an existing page / post, or create a new page / post
- (Put the cursor on the place where you want to display the gallery)
- Click the “Add NextGEN Gallery” button:
- In the popup screen that appears you select “Gallery” tab, choose a gallery and select how you want to show the gallery:
- Click the “Insert” button
For examples of how the galleries will look like, please take a look at the next part (Examples).
Examples
In this part I inserted the same gallery 3 times, but the first time I selected an “Image list”, the second time a “Slideshow” and the third time an “Imagebrowser”.
Example of an Image list
Example of a Slideshow
Example of an Imagebrowser
What’s next?
So, I hope you understand the basics of the NextGEN Gallery plugin by now. In one of my next articles I’ll write something more about the available options of the NextGEN Gallery plugin.
