Displaying photos in Wordpress
19th March 2007 by Simon
I’ve been looking at a few approaches for displaying photos in Wordpress blogs, for Ventnor Blog and Digital-Lifestyles.
There’s quite a few different approaches and these span Web 1.0 and 2.0. After filtering them down, the ones I’ve found most impressive are
- Falbum - which is a Web 1.0 approach, slickly done with next/previous ability. Loads a new page each time the photo is changed.
- Crossroads plug-in - Web 2.0 - fades out Web page behind and takes the whole screen to display the photos. Navigation is bold and clear at the top of the screen. Disadvantage - (currently) it doesn’t load the next image in the background, so stepping between photos isn’t as quick as it could be.
- Lightbox JS 2.0 - Web 2.0 - like crossroads, fades out Web page and sits on top. Has nifty, dynamic window resize to display different sized images. Advantage of displaying the photo name as a caption under the image. Navigation is kept within the photo frame, by popping-up navigation on top of photo.
- Slickr - Web 2.0 - like others, but possibily better thumbnail to photo arrangement.
Thumbnail images
On Digital Lifestyles, we have a 70px wide thumbnail for each story that we publish. These are to be used in illustrating search results, etc. Creating the image has a slight overhead in time. I found a plug-in, Post thumbs, that “automatically generates a thumbnail if a link to an image is found inside post content.” I’ve yet to investigate it, but it looks pretty promising. The only disadvantage of using the automated thumbnail is we often use a crop of one of the large images, or a completely different image.
- Possibly related posts -
- Wordpress Photo plugins: Update
- How to use WordPress to run a magazine news Website
- Wordpress Plugin: Page Category Organiser
(2 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
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More things around now. Here’s the summary of the update …
Aniga gallery. “manage your pictures in categories and albums”. “Its integrated in the WP posts system and uses the WP comments for pictures.” “Add Picture Captions”. Slideshows too. Look very comprehensive.
Enlarger - show larger versions of images within the same page. Auto reformat text to account for larger image. Neat fade.
WPG2 is a Wordpress Plug-in that embeds Gallery2 within Wordpress. Might be a bit over speced for current needs.
PictPress 1.0 - “automatically generates a post with thumbnails and picture posts for all images found in a directory.” Like the idea of the simplicity. Only talk about support for WP 1.5, so might be out of date. Example site looks good.
I’ve been amazed at how many of the plugins don’t give screen shots of what they look like whne they’re running, or access to a site using the tools. How are us supposed to make a decision about a visually-driven tool without being able to see it?
On another angle - Gallery2 Image Chooser is an interesting tool to allow you to select images form the Gallery2 collection of photos - then auto-insert them into a posting
PhotoQ makes it easy to create photo-focused blogs - “It is most suited for “one photo a day”-style web pages i.e., classical photoblogs.”
Random Image Plugin for WordPress. Nifty
[…] Back in March I wrote a piece about plugins that could be used to show photos in Wordpress. Well today I did some more research and found a bunch more sine the last time. Here’s the summary of the update … […]