Gallery plugin advice?

[Jeff Hester]

I'm looking for some advice on a good gallery plugin. I'd like to use WordPress' built-in gallery functionality to manage photos related to a specific post.

I'm currently using Lightview Plus. I like the interface, but as you can see here (the gallery is toward the bottom of the post), when I have a lot of images (and this particular post has 104!), the WP gallery function inserts thumbs for all of the images -- that's a LOT of images.

Ideally, I'd like to have either a single image for the gallery or maybe just a few thumbnails, with all the images available once you open the lightbox up.

I'm open to considering alternative approaches. Suggestions?

[Kris Themstrup]

Here's the thing - I don't believe the native WP gallery can really handle what you're trying to do. The way to get the lightview (which I assume is similar to lightbox) to have one image open up into a big gallery of several images is to use the rel function. It calls the lightbox on the image and also assigns organization to the images. So, you could have say 5 thumbnails, and you'd use the rel function like this

rel="lightbox[album1]"

and album2 for the second thumbnail and the associated gallery, etc. Now you'd also need to hide the other images too. You can do that with a simple CSS class called hidden, and use display: none;. Now you can still use the WP image dialogue to enter images, but you wouldn't really be using the gallery function. This might not be the best solution, but I know it will accomplish what you're trying to do. I've implemented it before, here's an example: http://www.sunbanksresort.com/about/photo-gallery/ - also, take a look at the source for that page and you'll see how I code in the images and galleries.

Hope this helps!