How Some Photo Gallery Plugins Look and Act in WordPress
WHY: I needed to find a way to display a group of photos as a multimedia element on my blog as part of my Master's capstone project, and so I set about playing with some possible platforms. In this video, I don't show the specifics of getting the technical plugins and embed codes set up, but I do show what the finished products look like as I explain their benefits and liabilities to my overall goals for the element.
WHAT: Solutions I explore:
Flickr's 'share with WordPress' function
WP Photo Album Plus plugin (https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-phot...)
Envira Gallery plugin (http://enviragallery.com/)
MEDIA: I use B/W photos that I took while in a classroom and a continuing education session. I prefer black and white photos for a number of reasons. In this application, B/W adds simple elegance eliminates the possibility of having an overwhelm of color detract from the narrative.
AUDIENCE: I originally created this tutorial to help one of the women in my cohort sort out a photo issue she was having and realized this subject might have wider appeal, so when I call you "Dee," it's because I love you. And because I made it for Dee.
BACKSTORY & JUSTIFICATION: I am filtering my discussion through our assignment, and in the case of the multimedia element our instructor is looking for, we are to write robust captions. I took it an overachieving step further and essentially wrote a mini-story under each photo. Captioning is important in photos though, because it creates attribution and copyright protections, and it allows the description writer to add important details to the story.
In this assignment I did a lot of exploration with the workflow involved in publishing photos into a photo gallery on my WordPress.org blog. This tutorial is an afterthought as a result of going through all that trial and error. Ideally I would have all of the metadata for the photos completed and uniform (saves SO much time over doing them individually), my photos named, edited, sized, and captioned in one folder. In that folder I would have a Word document with the Titles and photo captions. This would make cutting and pasting those descriptions so much easier. Sounds like another tutorial, doesn't it?
Happy viewing - hope this helps to save you time and teaches you how to make sound decisions about what solutions work for your audience and your elements.