Galleries anywhere and slideshows everywhere…

In a nutshell: upload images, drag-and-drop to order the sequence, grab the embed code & paste it anywhere to create an inline, standards-compliant gallery or slideshow.

How does it work?

Slideshows and galleries are created from either images uploaded to a page or post, or can be created from selected images in an album within an existing photo section. This means any page or post can quickly be turned into a gallery, or an existing album can just as quickly be embedded into a page or a post. You will notice the slideshow and gallery embed codes appear in the relevant places: simply grab the code and paste it where you want to embed the widget.

These new widgets differ in one area: slideshows are non-interactive, and galleries are interactive. In other words on a slideshow you will see only pause and play controls, while on a gallery previous and next controls are automatically present. It’s up to you decide which widget best works with your content.

What does it look like?

[[slideshow]] (with play & pause controls)
[[gallery]] (with next & previous controls)

Slideshows and galleries follow the same resizing rules as regular images: they are automatically sized down to fit into the restraints of the area you place them in. They also work best with images of similar dimensions: images that are not formatted the same as others might look odd within the sequence.

One other thing you need to bear in mind is that although it appears that only one image is present all the images in the widget load into your page at the same time. Don’t overdo it and load too many images up: it will affect page-load times and the eventual experience of your visitors. Aim for quality, not quantity.

Where can I see it in action?

Cinematographer Rory O’ Grady uses a gallery on his photography page, Illustrator Ian Jepson uses a slideshow on his about page, industrial design team Pedersen & Lennard use a gallery to demonstrate a manufacturing process on their fabricate page, Bolero Yacht uses a slideshow for a cinematic intro on their homepage and The Good Count uses galleries pretty much everywhere to build up a jQuery-based portfolio site.

We’ve enjoyed building and enabling this new feature, and we look forward to what you build with it too. Besides these widgets there are a couple of others we’ve been working on too - watch this space for details.

Update

Find out more about the ‘slideshow’ widget, the ‘gallery’ widget & all our widgets in our support section: Understanding widgets.