How do I organize photos for multiple galleries?

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I’m working on a site that will ultimately have dozens of photo galleries, each gallery with at least 3-4 photos, and possibly up to 20. Individual photos won’t have captions, titles or any other metadata; they’re all just pictures that belong in a gallery. (An individual gallery does have a title, description, etc.)

I am not sure how to best set this up in WordPress. I’m using WCK custom fields and I’m comfortable with custom pages, taxonomies, etc. Since the photos don’t have any metadata, it seems like overkill to create a custom page type for photos. But maybe I do that, and then also create a custom page type called “galleries” that lets the user pick which photos belong in the gallery?

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Or do I just set up the galleries as a custom page type, and somehow let the user choose multiple photos from the media library to put into the gallery? Then I’m not creating a separate page type for photos, but how would I let the user choose multiple photos from the media library to add to the gallery?

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  1. Recently I’m using this workflow:

    1. Register a custom taxonomy for attachments

    2. Use some code to add the feature of mass assign taxonomy terms to uploaded images

      (Because I do these 2 tasks frequently I’ve created a plugin that implement them and more see here)

    3. Create in a plugin a shorcode that looks like [gallery_term tag="landscapes, still_life"]. This shortcode takes the tag(s) passed as shorcode param and use them in a WP_Query with meta_query to retrieve images and output them.

    Once done I need only to upload images and assign them a tag for every gallery to which they belongs (using my plugin for bulk assignment it’s a cinch). The create a post (or a page, or a cpt) and use the shortcode. That’s all.

    This workflow is absloutely powerful and flexible:

    • I can have galleries wherever I want: in pages, in posts, in custom post types, even in sidebar. I can use post (or pages or cpt) title, content, taxonomies & custom meta for gallery details.
    • I can simply use the featured image as cover image for the gallery.
    • Photos can belong to different taxonomies, and so to different galleries, without have to upload them multiple times or have to add image informations multiple times.
    • All the features are implemented only via wp core features: solid and future proof!

    A great piece of my workflow is done by the shortcode function, that is something like this:

    add_shortcode( 'gallery_term', 'show_gallery_term' );

function show_gallery_term( $atts ) {
  extract( shortcode_atts( array(
    'tax' => 'media-tag', // this is the name of taxonomy registered by my plugin
    'tags' => '',
    'qv' => '', // query vars
    'template' => 'gallery.php', 'item_template' => 'gallery-item.php',
    'wrap' => 1, 'wrap_class' => 'gallery-wrap',
    'class' => 'gallery', 'item_class' => 'gallery-item',
    'th_size' => 'thumb',
    'link' => 1, 'link_size' => 'full', 'link_rel' => '', 'permalink' => ''
  ), $atts ) );
  // parse query vars
  $qv = wp_parse_args($qv, 'order_by=menu_order&posts_per_page=-1&post_mime_type=image/jpeg,image/gif,image/jpg,image/png');
  // force some query vars
  $qv['post_type'] = 'attachment';
  $qv['post_status'] = 'inherit';
  $qv['paged'] = get_query_var('paged') ? : 1;
  // the taxonomy query
  if ( $tax && in_array( $tax, get_object_taxonomies('attachment')) && ! empty($tags) ) {
    $qv['meta_query'] = array( array(
      'taxonomy' => $tax, 'field' => 'slug', 'terms' => $tags, 'operator' => 'IN'
    ) );
  }
  $images = new WP_Query($qv);
  if ( $images->have_posts() ) {
    $template = apply_filters('def_gallery_template', $template);
    global $gallery_query, $gallery_atts;
    $gallery_query = $images;
    $gallery_atts = $atts;
    ob_start();
    if ( ! locate_template($template, true, false) ) { // use a template file to display gallery
      if ($wrap) echo '<div class="' . esc_attr($wrap_class) . '">';
      echo '<ul class="' . esc_attr($class) . '">';
      $item_template = apply_filters('def_gallery_item_template', $item_template);
      while ( $images->have_posts() ) :
        $images->the_post();
        if ( ! locate_template($item_template, true, false) ) { // use a template file to display gallery items
          echo '<li class="' . esc_attr($item_class) . '">';
          $th = wp_get_attachment_image_src( get_the_ID(), $th_size);
          $title = esc_attr( get_the_title() );
          $rel = $link_rel ? ' rel="' . esc_attr($link_rel) . '" ' : '';
          $link_format = '<a href="%s" title="%s"%s>';
          if ($link) { // link to another size
            $big = wp_get_attachment_image_src( get_the_ID(), $link_size);
            printf($link_format, $big[0], $title, $rel);
          } elseif ( $permalink ) { // link post attachment permalink
            printf($link_format, get_permalink(), $title, $rel);
          }
          printf('<img src="%s" alt="%s" width="%d" height="%d" />', $th[0], $title, $th[1], $th[2]);
          if ( $link || $permalink ) echo '</a>';
          echo '</li>';
        }
      endwhile;
      echo '</ul>';
      if ($wrap) echo '</div>';
    }
    unset($gallery_query, $gallery_atts);
    wp_reset_postdata();
    return ob_get_clean();
  }
}

    This function provide huge flexibility, in fact:

    • I can use the file gallery.php in current theme to output my
      gallery (using global $gallery_query variable). If I want to use
      another template I can change it passing name via shortcode param or
      via a filter      .
    • Is possible don’t use any template for all gallery, but use a template for
      any gallery item. The default is gallery-item.php but again I can
      change it via shortcode or via filter. Using this template the
      attachment post is accessible in the global $post variable, so all
      template tags works
    • Is also possible don’t use any template at all and let function output the html. In this case a lot of options let configure the resulting html.
    • If one is lazy can use shortcode in like this: [gallery_term tag="atag"] and do not create any template file… it works!
    • The workflow is javascript agnostic: In the theme is possible enqueue the desired script go wild with it. Want to chang theme and chang script: no problem at all!

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