Albumize for WordPress | The Litschers.com

Albumize

Ken November 8th, 2008

I’ve been using NextGen Gallery for all of our images we post on our website. It’s great. It is incredibly robust, has a ton of options and features and was too difficult for my wife to remember what she needed to do to put a couple pictures of the kids up. WordPress introduced a gallery function when they rolled out 2.5 and it was easy to use, but hard to organize. Albumize grew out of a desire to simplify, yet still organize our family photos, and I believe it does just that.

Installation

Upload the `albumize` folder to the `/wp-content/plugins/` directory
Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
Create a page that will function as your album and place the [albumize] shortcode in it. Create child pages of your album page and place your galleries in them.
(Optional) Create a brief description of your gallery by using an “alb_blurb” custom field key and the description in the value.
(Optional) Select the gallery cover for the album by using an “alb_cover” custom field key and the number of the picture in the gallery (e.g. 5, 13, etc) for the value. The first picture in the gallery will be used by default.

Using Albumize

I’ve tried to keep Albumize pretty straightforward and easy to use. All you need to do to get it going is to pick a page that will function as your album and insert the [albumize] shortcode into the content of the page.

After creating that page, you just need to create child pages to place your galleries in. You can add the custom fields on the page to designate what you want displayed in the gallery and which image you’d like as the cover thumbnail when the album displays. Just add “alb_blurb” as the key and a brief description as its value. Then add “alb_cover” as the key and the number (in order) of the image you’d like to use as cover thumbnail. If you’d rather not mess with that, Albumize will just display the title of your child page and the first image in the gallery.

The result of all this handiwork is displayed below.

Styling

Version 1.2 added increasing styling options by wrapping each element in a <div>. There are two display options included with the plugin and limitless possibilities exist for any type of custom styling you would like to do. Horizontal styling is the default using only the [albumize] shortcode. However, to use the included vertical styling (thanks Roman!) simply use [albumize style='vert'].

To add your own custom styling, use [albumize style='yourstylename'] (where ‘yourstylename’ is any name you’d like to classify it as) and add the styling to your theme’s stylesheet. The Albumize elements are classified as the following:

albumize_gallery_yourstylename (main gallery div)
albumize_thumb_yourstylename (thumbnail div)
albumize_title_yourstylename (title div)
albumize_desc_yourstylename (description div)
albumize_count_yourstylename (count span)

Whatever you use for the style attribute will be used as the last part of the element classification when the album is displayed. Just add your own styling for these elements and you are all set to go. Add as many different styles as you want and call any of them using the style attribute.

The latest version of Albumize can be downloaded here. Thoughts, comments, questions, feature requests? Let me know.

45 Responses to “Albumize”

# Cle`on 10 Nov 2008 at 4:05 pm

I’ve tried it out but it doesn’t display any picture.. where did it catches the images?
# Kenon 10 Nov 2008 at 4:27 pm

Cle`,

Albumize grabs the picture from the gallery that is associated with the child page. Are you getting the title of your child page/gallery displayed? Let me know a little more info or give me a link to check it out and I’ll see what else I can do.
# Cle`on 11 Nov 2008 at 5:36 pm

Ken,
thanks for the advice, actually I found the problem: WP cache was not displaying right child pages and I was a bit confused.

Anyway, it is a nice plugin and asap I’m ready with my pics I will show it off, thanks =)
# Kenon 12 Nov 2008 at 8:50 am

Good to know Cle`, glad you like it. Let me know if you have any other thoughts once you get everything going.
# Willyon 12 Nov 2008 at 11:48 pm

Aloha,

I am having some trouble. My albums do not show up. I think my problem is I am not sure if I am setting my child pages up right. How do you create the Child pages to link to the Parent
# Willyon 13 Nov 2008 at 1:41 am

Got it figured out. I was using post as the parent. When I used page it worked just fine. Great plugin
# Kenon 13 Nov 2008 at 10:12 am

Glad you have it working Willy. Perhaps I’ll write something more detailed on using parent/child pages. I’m interested in your feedback after you use it a while.
# Willyon 14 Nov 2008 at 5:04 am

I really like albumize but I am not sure how I am going to use in on my blog. I have students post ot the blog but I don’t want to give them anything higher than Author so they cannot post to pages.

But all in all I do like what I have played with so far. Thanks for creating such a great plugin. I will send a donation in a couple of days.
# Mauriceon 14 Nov 2008 at 12:05 pm

Where can I see Albumize in action?
How deep kan Albumize be nested (gallery in album, albums in album?)
# Kenon 14 Nov 2008 at 1:06 pm

Maurice,

You can see it in action here by clicking on photos on the top of the page and then clicking on any one of the links for it. I haven’t had time to go through and add descriptions for each album yet, as I’m still making the transition from NextGen gallery, but if you look at the 2006 photos, you can see some descriptions there.

Currently, you can’t next albums in other albums or have more than one level of child pages/galleries under the parent/album page. Using Albumize will pull ALL child pages under the parent page regardless of how deep they are buried. If that doesn’t bother you, go for it. Please let me know if you have any other questions. There are more instructions on how to use it at the Wordpress.org extend page for it (linked at the bottom of the page).
# Adrianon 15 Nov 2008 at 8:32 pm

Great plugin,thanks
# Romanon 16 Nov 2008 at 1:15 pm

Awesome plugin. This is exactly what I was looking for. I did a little bit of editing, in the way of putting everything in separate DIVs to further customize the look, which can be found here: http://www.penguinandpanda.com/photos/

Again, awesome. Possibly you might want to put things in their own DIVs on the official release? When I updated the plugin all my old formatting was lost.. not a big deal, easily fixable, but it would be nice if that didn’t happen? And it would be easier for people to really customize the plugin’s output.
# Geoffon 22 Nov 2008 at 10:36 pm

Hi, really excited about this plugin, but the image is not shown…it gets the title fine, then says 0 pictures in Alum, but if you click on it the photos show up…tried the Alb_Cover trick and it did not work…any advice?
thanks for the help and thanks for the plugin.
best,
geoff
# Kenon 22 Nov 2008 at 10:48 pm

Geoff,

It looks to me like you are using NextGen Gallery instead of WordPress’ built in gallery function. Albumize won’t work with NGG, but there is an Album function in NGG that should do what you want. You just need to create an album in the back end and link it to the page. The NGG website will be much more helpful for finding out how to do that. If that doesn’t help, give me a little more details on what exactly you are using and trying to do.

Ken
# ovidiuon 24 Nov 2008 at 3:50 pm

this plugin looks awesome, but what is the order in which the albums show up? can I influence that? i.e. if I use it to show all albums from 2008 I’d love to show those in the order I specify…
# Kenon 24 Nov 2008 at 4:09 pm

Ovidiu,
The galleries display in the order of the date they were created, earliest to most recent. I’ve contemplated allowing the order to be changed by using the page order function, but haven’t yet. If you wanted to specify the order, for now, you’d need to edit the post timestamps and order them by the timestamp. Hope that helps.
# Brandon Pryon 26 Nov 2008 at 4:15 am

Great plugin.

Small question. Any idea why my main album is displaying outside the content area. My actual photos in the gallery arenot.

http://cardshout.com/photo-galleries/wallpapers/
# Kenon 26 Nov 2008 at 8:04 am

Brandon,

The album is being output in the content area, however some conflict with your theme’s css styling and the plugin’s is causing the display problem. What does it look like if you use the default display? My guess is it has something to do with the “height” element in the vertical styling, but css is not my strong suit. Let me know what happens when you use the default display and we can go from there.
# Brandonon 27 Nov 2008 at 12:41 am

Yeah I tried the default and had the same issue. I will mess with the CSS and see if I can figure it out.
# Kenon 28 Nov 2008 at 11:24 pm

Let me know Brandon. My guess is your theme’s CSS doesn’t like the float attribute in the plugin’s CSS. It may be worth removing that attribute in the plugin’s CSS and seeing what happens. Let me know how it goes.
# Dexon 30 Nov 2008 at 2:55 am

I tried the albumize and it is a great plugin. I managed to have the description appear but nit the photo. I use “alb_cover” and the image ID but it did not appear. Please help me sort this out. Thank you.
Dexter
# Kenon 30 Nov 2008 at 9:50 am

Dex,

Do you get an image to appear when you don’t use “alb_cover” at all? This should just bring up the first photo in the gallery by default. If that works, I’d guess the ID you are using is not valid. If it doesn’t work, it’d be helpful to see the pages you are using so if you could send a link, that’d be helpful. Thanks.
# Raphaelon 12 Jan 2009 at 3:52 pm

Hi

First, thank you for Albumize !! It is great !!

There is one thing I would like to know.

Is it possible to limit the depth of child pages ?

I would like [albumize] to only show the direct child pages, not the child pages of the child pages. Is it possible ?

Thank you for your answer.

Happy new year !

Raphael
# Raphaelon 13 Jan 2009 at 7:24 am

Sorry for my last question.

I have just read the readme.txt file.

Too bad it is not possible to limit the level of subpages.

Do you know why “depth” works for wp_list_pages and not for get_pages ?

Thank you

Raphael
# Kenon 15 Jan 2009 at 3:23 pm

I’m not sure why Raphael. I agree it would be nice to limit it, and it wouldn’t seem that difficult to add that possibility to the function, as it seems those two work in very similar ways. If anything changes I will definitely add that to the plugin! Glad you like it.
# kookimebuxon 01 Feb 2009 at 12:48 pm

Hello. And Bye.
# Thiet ke websiteon 08 Feb 2009 at 7:05 am

Thanks a lot for sharing this plugin.i love it’s functionality.

have a good day
# Amberon 16 Feb 2009 at 11:18 pm

I’ve installed albumize and created the parent pages and child pages but the child pages are appearing along the top of my blog as a link like the parent pages are. How can I remove the child pages from there?
Thanks in advance.
# Amberon 17 Feb 2009 at 12:48 am

Nevermind, my husband looked it over and was able to fix this. Thanks
# Robon 19 Feb 2009 at 6:51 pm

Hi. This is a great plugin and looks like it could save some time. I’m using a modified version of NextGEN gallery for most of my images – which opens a new page for each image.

I’m trying to use Albumize with my wallpapers photos. Have set up the parent/child pages and they’re working. However, on the parent page (radiantglory.com/wallpapers) the links to the child pages are hard to see, don’t have a thumbnail and say there are 0 images. I’m using the vert style, using the default style shows text links.

Is there something I’ve missed?

Thanks for any help you can give.

Rob
# Dianeon 20 Feb 2009 at 4:17 am

Thanks for making this easy to set-up. How can I get my photos to appear like the ones in your Wedding album: click on a photo and it opens with an arrow on the side to scroll to the next one?
My photos are opening in their own windows without the arrows. I’ve tried it with different themes including the default.
# Kenon 24 Feb 2009 at 4:42 pm

Diane, that effect is called Lightbox. I use the Lightbox 2 plugin (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/lightbox-2/) on my site. Hope that helps.
# Kenon 24 Feb 2009 at 4:45 pm

Rob,

I’m not entirely sure what the issue is. It kind of looks like you have the child pages set up, but the images displayed on the child pages aren’t linked to the child pages. In order for it to work, you will need to upload the pictures to the child page and use the [gallery] shortcode to display them. If you are displaying the pictures any other way, it could cause the issues you are having. Keep me posted.
# Raphaelon 27 Feb 2009 at 5:54 pm

Hi Ken,

I sent a message on this blog few weeks ago, but it seems you didn’t receive it. May be because I put a link to my website inside the message I sent. I guess you added a filter to avoid publication of messages including links.

I was telling I found a wordpress plugin that enables to publish a list of child pages and that also enables to choose the depth of child pages (from 0 to 5). The name of that plugin is SB Child List.

Unfortunately I’m a beginner in php and I’m not able to understand a php script.

I thought you could use that plugin in order to add the possibility of limiting depth of child pages in Albumize.

SB Child List contains only one php script but there are 300 lines of code.

My website is now online. I’m using Albumize on some of the pages.

Thank you

Raphael
# Kenon 28 Feb 2009 at 5:32 pm

Raphael,
Yeah, Akismet must have filtered it as spam, sorry about that. Thanks for letting me know – I’ll look into it and see if I can add that functionality.
# Raphaelon 19 Mar 2009 at 8:35 am

Hi Ken

Thanks for your answer.

It would be great if it was possible to limit the number of child pages !

I wanted to ask you another thing.

I recently wanted to know how to split pages into subpages. I use Albumize with some pages that might have 10 to 20 child pages. In that case, the height of the parent page would be very long.

I have heard about a wordpress function:

Would it be difficult to insert in the php script of Albumize so that every 5 or 10 children pages, the page would be split.

For example:

Vegetables (parent page)

Page 1 (Child pages)
1. Tomatoes (picture of tomatoes)
2. Onions (picture of onions)
3. Garlic (etc…)
4. Lettuce
5. Eggplant

Page 2 (Child pages)

6. Cucumber
7. Carrot
Etc…
# Putounkendeveon 20 Mar 2009 at 9:21 am

very intresting
# Raphaelon 20 Mar 2009 at 10:01 am

Hi

I’m sorry, the name of the wordpress function could not appear in the message. May be it is Akismet again that controled it.

I will write but with a space between each character:

This function enables to cut pages, so that at the bottom of the page there are page numbers 1-2-3…

Hope it is clearer now.

Thank you

Raphael
# Raphaelon 20 Mar 2009 at 10:04 am

I can see that again it did not work.

On google, if you search “wordpress nextpage”, the first result is the one that explains about the function.

Sorry for all these messages.
# Kenon 21 Mar 2009 at 8:31 pm

Raphael,

I should be able to add the nextpage function fairly easily – but I’m swamped now. If I get some breathing room soon I’ll see about adding that and limiting child pages. Thanks for the ideas!
# ovidiuon 22 Mar 2009 at 6:59 am

any chance to get this plugin working with this multilanguage plugin? http://www.qianqin.de/qtranslate/ I’d love to be able to use `[:en]eng. description[:br]portuguese description` inside the alb_blurb and get it to display the right description
# Raphaelon 22 Mar 2009 at 7:16 pm

Hi Ken

Thanks for your future help.

I found a way to limit child pages ! I’m very happy to have found it !

I checked the codex to have more information on the function getpages.

I found there the parameter “parent”.

Your code become like this:

$pages = get_pages(’child_of=’.$id.’&parent=’.$id.’&sort_column=menu_order&sort_order=asc’);

Hope it will be published on the blog !

See you

Raphael
# Jasonon 09 Apr 2009 at 11:10 am

I am still new to wordpress and learning. Where can I find WordPress’ built in gallery function? I searched Google but kept getting plugin info. I am currently using NextGen and would rather disable it and use the built in gallery with albumize and lightbox.
# Jasonon 09 Apr 2009 at 11:27 am

Nevermind. Of course I find a tutorial video right after I post the comment above. haha
# ovidiuon 26 Jun 2009 at 2:06 pm

it seems the albums get sorted by the menu_order, is there a possiblity to change the sort criteria to i.e. lasts update dateß or reverse the sort order from ascending to descending?