Do You Want an Easy WordPress Photo Gallery?

Author: , December 19, 2011, Leave a comment



WordPress is a popular and easy to use blog format. It allows anyone to build a website without learning HTML or other programming. Many people want to add photo galleries to their website which can now be done easily by adding a WordPress plugin. While there are many galleries available this is about the very easy to use NextGen Gallery.

Why use the NextGen Gallery?

Many of the other photo gallery plugins require additional plugins to do what NextGen does. It has a Flash slide show option. The photographs appear with a shadow to cover the site and make the photos show better. It also has an AJAX thumbnail generator which means the images appear faster without taking up more of your server.

How do I use this WordPress Photo Gallery?

Installation is easy when you use the add new plugin feature on WordPress. Set up is also easy. Once you have NextGen installed you will have a new box appear on the dashboard called Gallery. Note the icon looks somewhat like a scrapbook with a couple of photographs in front of it. This is where you can create galleries and add images to your WordPress site and WordPress Photo gallery.

Can I create galleries and add photographs easily?

You will notice there are many sub-categories within the gallery box. Click Add Gallery/ Images to create galleries and add images. The first thing you will want to do is to add a new gallery. After that you have several options to add images.

How do I add images?

You can upload an entire Zip-File to get a whole set of images quickly. Import image file enables you to connect to an image file you already have on your server. Upload image enables you to upload directly from your computer once you find the file choose your gallery and click the upload images.

What else can I do with the images and galleries?

With the other functions you can manage your galleries, moving photographs from one gallery to another. You can click on the image to change the meta tags on each image individually. You can also add titles and descriptions which helps search engines find your photographs which helps bring traffic back to your website.

How do I add galleries or pictures to my posts?

Hopefully you have TinyMCE. This is a plugin that makes your WordPress text editor work easier and add more functions. If you have TinyMCE you will notice a button that adds this WordPress Photo Gallery easily. You can choose to add a whole gallery or just an image. Adding photographs and galleries will be easy and look great on your website.

Photoshop – The Best Photo Editing Software

Author: , December 19, 2011, Leave a comment



Adobe Photoshop might actually be one of the best photo-editing software out there. It virtually covers all necessary features any digital artist would need to make great images. It also helps photographers improve the quality of their work taken by their cameras, so that they could either post them online or print out enhanced copies of your photographs, may they be wedding photography or children photography.

There is generally no hard and fast rule in learning how to use Photoshop, especially if you are one who is not accustomed to such kind of software. Although it is the best photo-editing software available, learning how to use this particular software is not only very dynamic but can be fun as well.

Explore. The #1 rule in trying to learn Adobe Photoshop is to engage freely in hands-on experience with the software. No amount of instructional books you read can ever amount to a few hours of playing with the software even if you don’t exactly know how. Try to play with any random image just to be familiar with what each of the basic features do and to what extent are such features capable of. The main reason why this is the #1 rule is that it is fun to do, especially if you’ve got lots of pictures at hand. Just don’t go around saving your work over the original images, you might not want to end up wrecking your image archives.

Search and learn. When you learn a bit about the basics, there are certain things that Photoshop is capable of that you might not know about yet, and the only way to discover what these things are is to find them on the internet or hear them from Photoshop experts. One of these would be “cloning” or “image layering”. These are things that can be done through Photoshop but usually require more than basic steps or usually require the combination of various basic features of the software. The best way to know how these things are done is to read about them or find them on the internet. There are lots of YouTube entries that demonstrate how some techniques are done in Photoshop, and they are all free for your consumption. You don’t have to pay for expert classes anymore because more often than not it’s the people who have more experience that matters.

Also, never forget that in order for you to be able to easily use Photoshop, you have to at least know the basic computer functions. Even the best photo-editing software cannot teach you how to use your computer better. Since Adobe software is Microsoft compatible, knowledge of the basic commands such as cut and paste or determining file sizes will definitely be applicable to your photo-editing activities.

Soon enough you will be producing much better output in your home photography business. Enjoy!

Best JQuery Photo Gallery and Slideshow – Galleriffic

Author: , December 19, 2011, Leave a comment



This weekend, I wanted to find an open source jQuery photo gallery and slideshow script that looked great and was easy to implement. After doing a lot of research and trying out different scripts, I discovered that Galleriffic is the best open source photo gallery and slideshow available by a long shot. I’ve been really impressed with Galleriffic and wanted to share this wonderful resource for today’s post.

What is Galleriffic?

Galleriffic is an open source script that’s built with jQuery and is free to use. jQuery has a lot of built in functionality to handle Flash-like transitions and fade effects.

Features

The Galleriffic script provides paginated thumbnails on the left side of the gallery, and a large image of the current thumb on the right. To view each image, users can click on the individual thumbnails, click on “Next Photo” or “Previous Photo”, click on “Play Slideshow”, click on the main image, or even use the arrow keys to jump between thumbnails. The size of the thumbnails is completely configurable. Gallerrific’s demo includes a set of 15 thumbnails for each thumbnail set. Users can page to each set of thumbnails with the pagination control above and below the thumbnail section. A title and description can also be accompanied with each photo.

Implementation

Implementing Galleriffic was a breeze. When you download the source code, you’ll get a folder of CSS files, a folder of Javascript files, and five example Galleriffic HTML files. The images, titles, and descriptions for your photo gallery and slideshow are stored in an unordered list with the class name “thumbs”. After moving the files to my web server and creating a PHP service to dynamically generate the unordered list code, I suddenly had a very rich, professional looking photo gallery and slideshow within about 15 minutes.

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