How To Make a Simple Photo Gallery

I am not a fan of Envira Photo Gallery. For most use cases, it is unnecessarily labor intensive. And it clogs up my plugins list with its myriad component plugins. So, as with all plugins I do not intend to use, I removed it and all it components.

Then I ironically installed the free Envira Gallery Light plugin. One lightweight component. And, for my use case, easy to use, fast and slick. It fit my use case perfectly.

Our club features a guest speaker or entertainer at our monthly meetings. My use case was to create and maintain a gallery of them primarily so non-members, especially prospective members, can see the kind of show we put on.

Each month we create a post for each of the featured folks that includes a photo. So those photos are in the Media Library. I just needed to arrange all 2½ years worth of them in a gallery and then add a new one each month. The result looks like this:

The line above the images reads:

Mouse over or tap a photo to view its caption. Click or tap a photo to start a slide show.

Works like a charm!

How To
The documentation is good, as is the user interface. Here is the only article I needed to get started. The steps are as follows:

You start a new gallery by giving it a name. The new gallery's ID displayed for you.

You upload an image. You caption it. Repeat.

Drag and drop the images to reorder them.

In about 30 minutes I was done.

Then I created a new page with the shortcode [envira-gallery id="5630"] (5630 is my gallery's ID). 

Each month, I add a new picture and caption it. It's already in the library by virtue of being in that month's post. Each newly added image starts on the top left (perfect, I leave it there!). Takes 5 minutes on a slow day.

The page is accessed with a top-level menu item labelled Speakers & Entertainers. Obvious.

That blue button on the bottom goes to a page containing a chronological list of all the speaker and entertainer blog posts in the archive from which each can be accessed. Which is infrequently what anyone is interested in doing. But there when needed, and discoverable.