th23 Gallery

WordPress has come a long way to be a fully featured content editor system, but the default gallery does not keep up with it. And while there are many plugins with various features, I did not find a small and simple one putting the focus on enlarged images.

PhotoSwipe is a great basis and thus core component of my th23 Gallery plugin, which replaces the WordPress default to output galleries into a way containing all key information required while maintaining a simple and easy markup.

th23 Gallery is built with some few goals in mind:

• Unintrusive way to focus on images
• Leveraging PhotoSwipe / Lightbox-like overlay
• Navigation between images in all galleries in a post via intuitive swipe, keyboard or mouse activity
• Compatibile with modern blocks and legacy shortcodes
• Simple markup and styling for thumbnail preview images (polaroid-style)
• Plain styling for medium / large preview images allowing for theme based style
• Minimized footprint on page loading

Usage

th23 Gallery works out-of-the-box and does not require any special handling – right after activation all embedded galleries will use PhotoSwipe to enlarge pictures.

Note: Polaroid-style works only on galleries which have set the preview image size to Thumbnail

Note: Previously inserted galleries might require a review to ensure link to media file and preview image size are set to work as expected – especially when also using the plugin on legacy [gallery] shortcodes.

v4.0.0 (first public release)

• n/a

Upload extracted files to your wp-content/plugins directory

No options required – install, activate, enjoy 🙂

Only optional setting is the option to define a default preview image size for new galleries via the Settings / Media page in the admin panel

Note: There is a known inconsistency in core WP not showing this default correctly in new galleries – but it is taken correctly upon saving/including the gallery and upon further edits as well