Gallery Demo
This is the gallery description, a standard wordpress page except that it has a gallery embedded below. You can have any number of these pages and associated galleries. The photo gallery plugin automatically arranges the thumbnails into a classy mosaic. When constructing or editing the gallery, you can set the order of the thumbnails.
This plugin, “Photo Gallery by 10Web” is one of the most popular free gallery managers. It does lots of things for us but has some restrictions, some of which hinted at below.
After you hit a thumbnail, you get the “lightbox”, one image with controls for next, previous, slideshow, full screen, info (description), etc. Hit the “X” to return to the thumbnail page.
The “driver’s license” images are various attempts at handling the annotation on the back of a photo:
- The first is “no back image”. The image description is a transcription of what’s on the back. The easiest approach except, of course, you don’t show the historic handwriting. Effort rating: 1.
- Next is “collage”, where I combined the image and its back into one image, guaranteeing that the image and its annotation are associated in the gallery. Of course, the image description could still be a transcription. Effort rating 6.
- Next is “two images”, one for the picture, one for the back. The easiest approach but, with this particular photo manager, you can’t guarantee that the two images will be side-by-side. (On different devices, the number of columns in a thumbnail row varies.) Effort rating 1.
- The next attempt embeds the back image in the description. Click the image and then “info” and you get a small version of back image. Probably the best way to go. Effort rating 3.
The wide treasury building image demos that the description is not always formatted for visibility. The gallery uses what they think is a color that will work on almost any image. If you take the treasury building full-screen, the description becomes readable.
Visitors to the site will have to know to hit the “info” button in order to get the image description. Also, they must know about the “X” top/right to get back to the thumbnail page. There is a gallery option to show the description automatically–I turned that off because the image gets obscured when the description is present.