Hey, you know ‘Random Curiosity’. Scary amount of episodes summarized quickly but what really gets most people is all those lovely screenshots that are uploaded to the site, and they all lead to a larger version. Man, that takes work, care and effort. 

I had once toyed around the idea of a plugin to generate all the image codes in small thumbnails all leading to a directed folder. It seems wordpress 2.5 beat me to it though with the new Gallery feature already in the packet. Let me walk you through it. 

The new media uploading system is sleek and cool. I used to not use this at all since it was a pain to use and was too slow to use before. Now it has been redesigned better than ever and this is what I am interested in. The new unloader runs on flash. Sadly those without flash installed on their computer will miss out on this awesomeness.

The ‘add media’ is located just above the post entry box and below the post title box. Roll over the icons to get a description. We are interested in Images here.

You could upload an image from the internet straight to your site or from your own computer (more likely). Let’s click ‘Choose files to upload’.

Highlight the files you want and click open. Here in this walkthrough, I just picked 10 random images that were laying around. The process was so fast and painless. I am loving it already. 

As each image is loaded, clicking on the image allows you to add in some extra details. Technically, from an SEO standpoint, I should have put alternate test and descriptions to all my images but that was a pain before when I would have to meddle with img tags. Now it is an easy interface to add these.

The caption will be the text used in the image space if the image fails to load. It is also the caption under the corresponding image when it is used in the gallery. 

From here, you can also easily insert the image straight into your blog post. The options are great. The image can link to its own file, a post page just for the image or no link. Size inserted can either be thumbnail, medium or full sized. The thumbnail and medium size preferences for you can be changed in settings->Miscellaneous.

Done with all that, you will now have some images in the post’s gallery. Go to that tab!

Click ‘insert gallery into post’ and you’ll get [ gallery ] inserted into your post… without the spaces of course. Gotta love that Shortcode.

You can add options to the gallery. The only useful options to me are sizes and columns. The default sizes for the images are thumbnail, and the default number of columns for the images is 3. This can be changed by altering the values. Full details on the Gallery Shortcode here.

You can see the results of the gallery below and I must say, it works like a beauty. I love it. Alteration to it can be done in css I believe. I haven’t taken a look at the exact code doing this function yet though. 

One of the better things is where the images lead to their own posts. This is what the images in the gallery will do by default. Your description and title are there and people can even comment on the image. Ala, you have an almost flickr system. I find it pretty cool. 

I talked about a new era when 2.5 was released, but on discovering this handy feature, I am more convinced than ever. This will make episodic blogging so much easier… and I guess showing off photography, and other large scores of images easier. Although I can see the huge potential from this new feature, such as Omni no longer needs to slave as machinelike as before, I can also see this being abused… With screenshot spam and some other trip. I feel this will bring down the integrity of the blogosphere a bit. 

However the advantages are just too great. Blogging is hard. Really it is. It takes time to do, time we may not have. Wordpress 2.5 has made it a hell of a lot better. And this is why I love Wordpress.

On a side note, this post would have taken so much damn longer to make pre2.5. Wordpress is almost epic win. Close to that is the Fluency Admin theme for wordpress 2.5 which is all kinds of awesome, from the same person who created the Redoable theme I am using right now. The above screenshots were done in the normal wordpress admin so as not to confuse anyone, however I am loving the fluency theme that I am using right now. A few bugs here and there but they will be fixed pretty soon in release 1.1. Try it out!

Although I did this from an anime blogger’s point of view, maybe I should just get fully back into the web design field. This post was a kick to write!