I’ve been pretty happy with the new-ish WordPress gallery. I haven’t used it a whole lot, but for the Photos that I’ve taken it has worked decently. When they first released the new gallery, it seemed like a huge thing with tons of features, but it really isn’t. Sure the new image uploader is nice, and the gallery pages are cool, but if you want more than that, you’ll have to hack your way to what you want.

I made my gallery page display a thumbnail from the gallery next to the info. This looks great, but it only works when there is a photo in the first spot. If for some reason the photo that you tried to upload didn’t go, or you decided that you didn’t like it and deleted it then there’s nothing.

I would also like a simple feature that returns a random image from the gallery. There’s nothing that can do this. It would be great to be able to display a random image in my sidebar, or on gallery pages, but right now that’s impossible.

What I really want

The random image thing is simple, just the simplest template tag for a random gallery image. Maybe you could even specify posts that you don’t want included, but easy stuff.

The default gallery thumbnail is a little more complex, but not much. I want something that lets you choose an image from your post to be the ‘default gallery thumbnail’. Then a template tag that returns the default gallery thumbnails. Then you could even have it setup so that if you change your mind on a particular gallery, you can go back and change the default thumbnail.

I’ve been looking for a solution to this for awhile, maybe I’ll try to throw something together that accomplishes this.