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Hi, everyone.  Welcome to BuildMySiteForFree.com.  In today’s tutorial, I’m going to show you how to install and use a very popular photographer plugin called “NextGEN Gallery” plugin.  And this is a plugin that has a full integrated image gallery. It allows you to upload photos, create slideshows and thumbnails of the photos, and there are a lot of other
features with this plugin as well.

So first, what you want to do is find the plugin.  So what I did was came to BuildMySiteForFree.com and clicked the plugins link at the top right-hand corner.  And they’re all listed alphabetical, in alphabetical order.  But what I did is I came to page 12 just to show you where to find the plugin, and I clicked on the “NextGEN Image Gallery,” where it says “Download Now.”  And this will bring me to the WordPress.org
page for this plugin.

And now just for you to see the other features that this plugin has, you can scroll down, and there’s a really long list of all of the features this plugin has to offer.  Because today, I’m going to show you how to install it and then upload some photos with the gallery, but I’m not really
going to take you through every single feature the gallery plugin has.  So definitely check this page out for all the other things that this plugin has to offer.

But after you have clicked “Download” and came to this page, what you want to do is download this as a zip file by clicking “Download Version.”  If you have a Mac, you want to double-click, scroll down where it says “Download Link File As…”  It should come up as a zip file, and then you click “Save.”

Then what you want to do is come back to the Dashboard.  Click where it says “Add New” on the plugins link on the navigation menu, and then you’re  going to click “Upload.”  And from here, you’re going to choose the file you just saved, and then you’re going to install it and activate it.

Now that we have installed and activated the plugin, what you want to do next is scroll down to where it will now say “Gallery” on your avigation menu.  And as you can see, there are a lot of different links for different options for this gallery.

So first though, what we’re going to do after we installed it is go to the gallery.  So what you want to do is click “Add Gallery/Images.”  And this will bring you to a page where you  want to add a new gallery, so you want type in a name for this gallery.  So I’ll just type in something like, “My Vacation Photos.”  And then you’re going to click “Add Gallery.”

Next, what you want to do is upload the images.  So it will automatically bring you to an “Upload Image File,” and you can upload a zip file or import an image folder if you’re choosing to do otherwise.  And what you’re going to do here is click “Browse,” and I should have them all saved in My Documents.  And let’s see.  Here we go.  I’m going to copy these four.  You can copy…  You can upload as many as you want and any way you want.

Now what I want to do is choose the gallery I want them to go into.   Since I only have one already, there’s only going to be one there.  But you may have several.  So you could choose which gallery you want the photos to go into by clicking the drop-down menu.  And then finally, you want to click “Upload  Images.”  And as you can see, it’s going through each image, and it very quickly uploads, and then it creates new
thumbnails very quickly as well.  So in about five to ten seconds, they’ll be uploaded to your computer, and it will now say, “Four pictures successfully added.”

So now that we have created our gallery and uploaded our photos, what we want to do is manage our photos.  So what you want to do next is click “Manage Gallery.”  And here, you can click on the gallery you just created – or any gallery you have, for that matter, on your list – and you can do other things.

So now we can create a description.  For instance, “Here are the photos from my trip to Italy.”  You can also choose if you want the page linked to something from the drop-down menu.  You can even preview images, as well as set authors or create new pages from here.

And then, if you scroll down, what you can also do is create alternate text and descriptions for each photos, which I won’t go through now, but I definitely suggest it because it’s a nice thing to add to each photo instead of having it just say, “Italy-4, Italy-3,” or whatever yours will say.  You can even include text in this option as well.

What you can also do is edit the thumbnails.  So if I click “Edit Thumbnail” for this picture, it’s going to bring this picture here for me to
basically crop a different part of the thumbnail I want it to show.  So I could have it look just like that.  And then, for instance, click “Update.”  I’ll just exit out for now.  And I could rotate them and publish them as well.  So here’s where you pretty much sort your gallery and change and update any options you want.

Now what you want to do is create a post or a page to insert these photos in. So I’m going to save my changes because I did insert a description.  Make sure you always save any changes that you have.  And then I’m going to go to post and click “Add New.”  This will bring to my “Add New Post” page.  So I will label this post “My Vacation Photos,” just like I labeled my gallery.

I could insert anything I want into the post, but what I also want to do is insert the code for my photo gallery.  So now that you’ve installed
this plugin, you will have a link right up here that if you scroll over it, the  tooltip will come up where it says, “Add NextGEN Gallery.”

So you’re going to click that link, and you can then choose which gallery you want to upload into this particular post or page.  So you scroll
down and choose which one you want.  You could then show if you want it to be an image list, slideshow, or image browser.  You can even insert an album or a picture from here as well.  And then you’re going to click “Insert,” and then you’ll see a code will insert into my post textbox with the gallery that I chose.

Finally, what we want to do is publish this.  Now once it’s published, we want to view what we just did.  So you would click “View Post.”  And now you will notice here is the thumbnails of all the different pictures I just uploaded.  If I uploaded more, there would be a long list of them here, And you can even click “Show as Slideshow,” and it will come in as a slideshow as you click them.

And you can go back and set dimensions of how big you want these photos to look and different theme templates you may want to show as the background of your page.  And this is how you install, use, and add a gallery with the NextGEN Gallery plugin.

Thanks for watching.  Please stay tuned for more videos at Build MySite For Free.