fGallery Plugin

We have a new area of the site.

Image Gallery

For a long time I’ve been unhappy about how images are managed on this site.  Basically I had been creating the images and the thumbnails manually, uploading them to a directory and then linking them to posts.

However I found that I was getting hardly any hits from google images, disproportionately less than what we get in text queries, so I have known that something has to be wrong.

I took a look at some php/mysql image galleries but in the end wasn’t happy about how difficult they were going to be to integrate into the wordpress components of the site so began looking for a suitable wordpress plugin.  I ended up at the WordPress Codes Image Plugin page.

What a nightmare.  There’s like a hundred plugins on that page, and the descriptions aren’t the most helpful.  What they really need is some sort of rating system so that the wheat is separated from the chaff.

In the end, in a moment of genius (sarcasm), I searched google for “best wordpress image gallery plugin” and got a shortlist of sorts.

From this, I ended up picking fGallery by Fredrik Fahlstad.  It’s not all that but it serves the purpose.  The main feature I wish it had was a more flexible category system, but I can live without it for the moment.

So yeah, if all you want is a plugin which stores images in albums, supports automatic resizing and thumbnailing and has a reasonable amount of flexibility in terms of being able to turn things on or off, then fGallery is probably for you.  Note, when installing, follow his instructions properly.