Every since starting my photo blog I’ve wanted to make a gallery archive page but I couldn’t figure out how to do it except for manually put a link and image onto a page every time I post a photo.
Recently I found some plugins that sounded promising until I realised that they work in conjunction with Gallery. Gallery looks great and I would be interested in using it but it can’t be used in PHP Safe Mode and the server that I use can only be used in safe mode. I think this has to do with the way that everyone has a shared space which is why you only pay for what you use. This amazing site is one that uses Gallery.
Anyway, this evening I just googled for “archive page for wordpress photo blog”, previously I had been looking through the plugins page. One of the results that was yielded was this page. It’s excellent. Using this method I have created a “page”, like one would for an “about me” or “100 things”. Then you can attribute a certain template file to the page, i.e. archives.php and using a command to get an excerpt from every post you can create a gallery by defining a thumbnail as an excerpt for each post. This means that I have to manually create a thumbnail for each image but this is simple enough since I need to resize each image before I post them anyway.
Maybe that didn’t make much sense, probably not at all if you don’t use wordpress. If you go to this page you can see what I’ve done. If you visit the page and there is a bunch of random text instead of images, it’s because I haven’t yet assigned an image as the excerpt for that post and it’s just grabbing text from the post.