How to Use the Page Flip Image Gallery Plugin

Hi, everyone.  Welcome to BuildMySiteForFree.com.  In today’s tutorial, I’m going to show you how to find and use the plugin called “Page Flip Image Gallery.”

Now this plugin allows you to create a book of images to flip.  So it adds a nice effect to your blog; it adds a lot of creativity to your blog.  And it actually looks exactly like a book: You could flip through all the pages, except they’re images that you have uploaded.  And I really particularly like this plugin a lot.

So to actually find this plugin, what you want to do is come to BuildMySiteForFree.com, and you’re going to click the top right-hand link where it says “Plugins.”  And now as I’ve told you in other plugin videos, all of the plugins on this website are listed in alphabetical order.  So you just have to scroll through them and find it.

But this particular plugin is on the 12th page, and it’s on this bottom row – the “Page Flip Image Gallery.”  Now what you want to do is download it to your computer as a zip file from here, and then you come back to your Dashboard, and then you install and activate it.

Once you’ve installed and activated this plugin, it will now be its own setting down here in the navigation menu under “Flipping Book.”
And if I open up the sub-menu for Flipping Book, as you can see, we have three different pages.  The first one, which is called “Main” looks like this page, and the only reason you really need this page is to copy this book code right here, which is what you’re going to use to paste into your post, which will allow this Flipping Book to appear  on your blog.  And I will come back to this at the end because that’s when you do, in fact, need this code.

The second setting is the “Manage Books and Pages” setting, and if you bring it to this page, you will notice that here is the Flipping Book that I have just uploaded.  And I’ve already done it, but what I’m going to do is bring you through the process of how I did this.  But when you get to this page, it allows you to add pages.  You have two edit options where you could edit the page and the book properties.  You can preview it and even delete it.  So I will come back to this page in a minute as well.

And the very last setting we have is the image setting, and this is where you want to start.  So I showed you the three settings that you have on Flipping Book, but what you want to do first is – after you’ve installed it and activated it on your blog – you want to click this first link
called “Images,” and this will bring you to the image page where it allows you to upload the images you want for your Flipping Book.

So if I was going to create a new gallery right from here, I would click this, and it would bring me through the same process I’m about to show you.  But since I’m already using this album that I already created, I’m going to take it from there.

So what you would do when you get to this page is upload any images that you would like.  Once you’ve uploaded them, what you want to
click is “Create Book,” and it will bring you to this settings page.  Now this has a lot of settings, and a lot of them are set by default, so you really don’t need to change them.  But it does allow you to switch a lot of different things that you may want to customize your Flipping Book.

So first, you have the title box, and this is where you’re going to want to title your book name.  So as you saw, mine was Cold Europe, so
that’s where I typed in right here.  And as you scroll down, a lot of the first few settings are just how you want the width and height to look of your blog. So we have the stage width and height, the width and height in pixels, how we want our book centered.

I’m not going to go through all of them because there’s a lot.  I’m just going to show you some of the ones that I think are kind of cool to customize your Flipping Book.  As you scroll down a little bit further, a lot of these images are how you want the image of your Flipping Book to look – a lot of these settings, rather.

So we have our background color.  If you know hexadecimal code, you could type it in this box; if not, you could just search for the color you want by scrolling your cursor through the colors and then clicking on one.

Then we have our background image, and by default, it’s set as this wooden panel type of look, but you can also change it to no background.  If you don’t want a default or the no background, you have the option to even upload a background image for your flipping book, and you could upload any image you have in your computer.

And I’m going to skip a few, but as you scroll down a little bit further, we have what the frame width and frame color that you’d like the book to look like. So a lot of these settings are to make your Flipping Book look actually like a real book.  You could even choose if you wanted it to be a hardcover, and if you do – if you want it to – what thickness you’d like it to have.  So the higher the number, the thicker it is; the lower the number, the less thick it is.

And as you can see, a lot of these options are just yes or no, so you could pick whether you want it or not.  It’s not too complicated to figure
out.  Then what I think is really cool is the next few options.  You could decide how you want the pages to actually look. If you want them to look rigid, if you want them to look smooth, if you want them to look dark and have like, a shadow highlighting, you could choose any of these options right here.

We also have a preloader, so when your Flipping Book starts, it has to preload a little bit, so you could choose whether you want it to be a progress bar, which is what I particularly like, or there are a few other options you could choose from this drop-down menu.

You can even choose if you want this book to always appear open or closed. As I scroll down a little further, you can even choose how you want the pages to look as you’re scrolling through the pages, as you’re scrolling through the page corners.

And if I go down a bit further, I actually really like these next few options. You can allow it to have a flip sound.  So as you’re flipping through the pages, you’ll hear a flip sound, and there’s three different mp3 files you could choose from or you could choose no sound at all.  You could even upload your own sound as well.

Then, like in most videos or image files, you have a navigation bar. So you could choose from either two of these.  And as you can see on the navigation bar, we have a fullscreen option, a zoon option. You could go to whatever page you want by typing in the number right here.  And of course, we could go forward and backward with all these options.  So you could choose from either of these. And then you can also choose if you even want it or not and if you want it at the top or the bottom.

So these are all the settings for your navigation bar right here where my cursor is scrolling.  And then you go down a bit further, and these
are all the zooming in options – if you want to zoom on click, if you even want the zoom enabled.  So you might want to check these out also.  And if you don’t, they’ll just be set by default as WordPress already sets them.

And then if we get to the very end, we can choose if we want a slideshow button, a slideshow autoplay, how long we want the slideshow to be.  And then lastly – and like I said, I’m skipping over a few because a lot of them are just self explanatory – but you can also choose if you want this to open…  If you want the book to open up in a pop-up window, you can choose yes or no.

Finally, when you’re done, what  you want to do is click “Add Book.”  And once you do that, you’ll be brought back to this page where you have your book that you just created.  So if you ever want to go back to those book properties, all you do is click this button right here.

But if you also want to edit the way the layout of the book looks like, you can click “Page Editor,” and this will bring you to the album that you just created.  But what you could do is select the layout by clicking these buttons right here.  So here, you can see all my pictures, and then I could just…by clicking each one of these, it will show the different layout of how it would look.

Now I want to go back to one last thing before we finally put this Flipping Book on our website.  This is the ID number of our book, so this is the only thing you’re going to need when you’re pasting the final code into your post.  So remember that this is ID number 3.

So finally, we’re going to come back to the main page.  Here’s the code we’re going to use, so we’re going to copy this code.  We’re going to go over to “Add a New Post.”  And all we’re going to do is paste the code into our text box, but since it is the ID number 3, we’re going to change it to 3.

So all you need is this code, and the only thing you have to do with the code is insert the number right here of what Flipping Book you are uploading. You also have the option to add text here as well, but I’m not going to do that.  I just want my Flipping Book.

 

So let’s finally see what it looks like.  So I’m going to click “Publish.”  It might just take a second to publish.  Now I’m going to click “View Post,” and when I view the post, as you see, here’s our Flipping Book and this is exactly how it looks.  We have our wooden panel; we have our navigation bar down here; and if we scroll through, we have our flipping sound and it shows all the pictures I had uploaded.

 

So it’s a really cool, effective feature to have on your blog.  You go through all the steps that I just mentioned, and you’ll have a really nice
Flipping Book to add for all your followers to see.

Thank you for watching.  Stay tuned for more videos.

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About the Author

Andy Johnson

Andy Johnson has been on the Internet since the its dawn(ie his first computer program was recorded on cassette tape) and his first hard drive cost about as much his current MacBook. His first byline was in 1993 for a local newspaper rag he eventually helmed, and his last “real job” was at a computer start up which ended when it ended. Throughout it all he’s freelanced and blogged. Now he is mesmerized by Search Engine Optimization forever trying to “rise to the top” for the right reasons. He’s been married to his wife Julia for as long as he can remember and has two lovely, wonderful children. He looks forward to sharing the latest in the technical best for all the online entrepreneurs.