With the new work site about to come online, I’ve been experimenting with various options for displaying photo galleries in WordPress. I’ve used Gallery2 with the WPG2 plugin for quite a long time on many of my sites, but it’s getting a little long in the tooth. Gallery3 hasn’t seemed to get a lot of traction yet and I really wasn’t too impressed with the other WordPress gallery options I tried.

There is a Lightbox plugin I’ve been using for a bit on this site called jQuery Lightbox For Native Galleries. It works with built-in WordPress galleries, which I also didn’t really like much. After reading more about them, however, I’ve decided to migrate from Gallery2 to native galleries and use the Lightbox plugin for all of my images.

There is another plugin out there that’s supposed to help automate this conversion, but I have so many images and albums, that I really want to do it manually. I’ve already culled some albums and might decide to only repost the best images in some of the larger albums (especially with golf and hockey shots).

I still need to research a way to replicate the random photo in the sub-footer (and not include private photos), reload several photo categories, decide how best to handle URL re-directs and/or 404 issues with the old Gallery2 URLs and decide if I want a better way to deal with titles, captions and EXIF data.

So far, though, I’m pretty happy with how things are working. Here is a sneak peak of the new look – feedback is always welcome.