Build My Site for Free

Hi.  Welcome to BuildMySiteForFree.com.  In today’s tutorial, I’m going to show you how to find and use a popular photographer plugin called “Lazyest Gallery.”  And Lazyest Gallery is a plugin with an integrated image gallery with automatic thumb and slide creation, slideshows, comments on images.  It includes widgets, a flash uploader. It’s a really great plugin to have.

So to find it, what you want to do is come to BuildMySiteForFree.com and click on the plugins link.  And when you scroll down to page one of the photographer plugins, you will find it here labeled “Lazyest Gallery.”  And from here, I downloaded it as a zip file, and then I uploaded it onto my Dashboard by clicking “Plugins,” “Add New,” and then “Upload.”

Once you have found and then installed the plugin, what you can do is create some settings for your image gallery and then start uploading photos.  So now that we have the plugin, what you can do is come to settings on the navigation menu, and you can click Lazyest Gallery.  And this will bring you to the Lazyest Gallery settings page.

So the first thing that you actually have to do before using all the features this plugin has to offer is create a gallery page and a folder.  So
by default, they actually already have this folder, so you can use it or create your own.  And you have your gallery page, which I actually made a separate page called My Photos.  You can also use it on any other page you already have created by choosing from the drop-down menu.

And then all the options on this page are set by default, but you can change them, and they’re pretty much all the settings you would have for any type of photographer plugin as far as the dimensions for the page, where you want some of the folders to be, and what you want them to include.  As you scroll down, you could enable thumbnail caching as well as cropping.  So any of these that you decide you may want, you can check off if they’re not already checked off or used by default.

You have slide view options that you can enable.  We have caption and description options so that you can actually check off if you want image
captions instead of the file names, which is what I like because file names are ugly.  They’re just letters and numbers.  So you can actually include  image captions and even descriptions in thumbnail view as well.

And as you scroll down, you have a lot of other different options to choose from, different uploading options, as far as if you only want certain roles – if you have a blog with multiple  authors – to be able to use it.  If you want to enable a flash uploader or a publishing wizard support.  A lot of these are very self-explanatory, so I’m not really going into any of them too deeply.

And then, of course, you have your advanced options, and these are such things as if you want to use permalinks for the gallery, you could heck off this box.  If you want to append the gallery to WordPress search results – so if you want your gallery to show up in the results, you can by checking that off.

And you have other sorts of options, such as what you want the images and the gallery to be listed as.  And, of course, when you’re done setting any of these options, you want to click “Save Changes.”  So here is where you come if you just want to change any further options that have not already been set by default.

Now here is where I showed you where you can find the settings under Lazyest Gallery on your settings sub-menu, but now that you have the plugin, you also have a link underneath the navigation menu where it says settings called “Lazyest Gallery.”  And here is where you want to click to  actually upload images.  So you would click “Lazyest Gallery,” and it’s going to bring you to this page where it will say “Edit Lazyest Gallery Structure.”

So here is the title we made for our page called “My Photos.”  That is where you’re going to click to actually come to the photos.  However, this is going to be one of our albums or folders in our page.  So you only have one right now, but as you can see, you can type in a folder name and
add as many folders as you want by coming to this page.  And when you want to upload images to your folder, you just simply click on the folder name.

So I labeled mine “Europe.”  So I click that album or folder, and I come to a page where I have the option to insert captions, to choose whether you have to be logged into this folder or you want this folder to be hidden.  You can choose a description to insert before all of your photos are actually shown.

And then finally, you can upload photos.  So here, we have the upload image where you’ll select files by either using the flash uploader or the
browser uploader.  And once you have uploaded those files, they will appear up here in your list.  So as you can see, I have already uploaded
several files.  Next to each file name, you have the option to edit, delete it, and view it, as well as move it and copy it.  And then, of course, an option to insert a caption, which is what I went ahead and did.  So this page pretty much allows you to just upload images as well as edit them, and you can even add new folders right from here.

So now that I’ve showed you how to get this plugin, how to change the settings, and how to upload the photos into your gallery, let’s check out the actual page.  So here we are on my blog.  Here’s the page that we labeled it under “My Photos.”  If I actually click my My Photos page, it will just show you all the list of folders you have.  Once you click on an actual folder, it will then bring you to that photo gallery.

So here we have our gallery.  Here’s the description I inserted, and here are all of my photos with all of the different captions that I’ve added.  You could add as many folders as you want, as many pictures as you want, and there’s a lot of other great features in the settings link that you can check out as well.

And this is how you use the photographer plugin Lazyest Gallery. Please stay tuned for more videos on BuildMySiteForFree.com