I’ve been cautious about upgrading to the latest wordpress version 2.5 because it breaks my new template and causes some of my favorite plugins to not work. I also don’t like the interface – but, I will get used to it. In the meantime, I have converted only 3 blogs in the HART-Empire Network to wordpress 2.5 until I’m sure everything is working fine. And, in my case – finding the time to figure out some of the benefits of this new upgrade.

The New WordPress Picture Gallery

There is a new Flash Uploader now with wordpress 2.5. In the WRITE screen, there is a little icon where you can upload images, and other media. When you click it, a flash window pops up.

Click the button to browse files on your computer

The nice thing about this, is that if all your pictures are sorted in the same folder on your computer, just hold down the CTRL button and click various files to upload multiple files at once.

Now, after I uploaded all of the pictures, there seemed to be a whole lot of error messages received. I think one of them is directly related to my Pmetrics plugin and I haven’t figured out why I get the others – yet. I just know that the pictures are there. Feel free to add any description to the picture. If you notice the one shown above, I added a description – and it appears on the original site as a caption beneath the picture.

Once you have added all of your descriptions and comments – don’t forget to save all changes! This adds the description permanently and associated with the picture in wordpress.

In the Flash Uploader screen .. click the “Gallery” tab. All the picture thumbnails are there now – and all you have to do is scroll down to the bottom and click “Insert Gallery Into Post” button.

What happens, is that it inserts a one-word code into your wordpress post – (excluding the quotations and space) – looks like above .. (so when I upgrade to the 2.5 version it won’t disappear in this post). The image is from my PetLvr blog – before publishing.

“[” gallery “]”

And Voila!

See this in action over at PetLvr Blog