I’ve been using WordPress for this blog for quite a while now, and I’ve been using Gallery for my photo gallery for a very long time. I finally got around to putting the two together. It’s not really that hard since there’s a WordPress plugin for just this function. It’s called WordPress Gallery2 Plugin (WPG2).

The main thing stopping me was the need to upgrade my Gallery installation so it would be compatible with the latest WPG2. This turned out to be fairly painless. I made a backup of my gallery database using phpMyAdmin. Then I downloaded and installed the latest Gallery release and ran through the web setup pages. It went off without a hitch. I installed a couple Gallery plugins to make things work better with WordPress, including ImageBlock and ImageFrame.

Next I installed the WPG2 plugin for WordPress. Basically, you just unzip it in the plugin folder and click on the WPG2 tab in the WordPress administrator page. Once again there was a simple web based setup and I was ready to go. Now you can see my gallery embedded in my blog layout by clicking on PHOTO GALLERY in the dark blue navigation bar near the top of the page. I also added a photo gallery navigator and random picture to the sidebar to the right. Another cool feature is it lets me add pictures to my blog postings directly from the gallery, and I can even enable neat effects like Lightbox pop-ups (click on picture on right).

The only down side so far is that loading my main page seems slower, but maybe it was that slow before. Hopefully all this new technology will improve my blogs more than not.