Editing Your WordPress Gallery

Last Updated on January 19th, 2020

If you have requested the Carousel Gallery (default WordPress Gallery) to display your work, we will set-up your galleries for you as part of the design project. However, you may well want to make changes down the track.

This post will guide you in how to edit your WordPress Gallery.

Making Changes to Your WordPress Gallery

Please follow these steps:

Step 1

Logged into your WordPress Dashboard, go to Pages in the left-hand sidebar and find the gallery page you’d like to edit. When it opens, you will see your gallery in the Visual Editor:

Click on the images and the little pencil icon will appear. Now, click the pencil icon to edit the gallery.

Step 2

The gallery will open in your WordPress Media Library like this:

You can then click the Add to Gallery to upload new images.

You can also drag and re-order the images. To delete images from the gallery, simply click the X button. (This does not delete the image from your Media Library. It only removes the image from the gallery.)

If you want to replace the exact image with another one (for instance, you may want to replace an un-optimised image with an optimised verison), then you will need to do two things:

1. Delete the image from the Media Library

Click on the image in question and you’ll see meta data appear in the right-hand sidebar. Select Delete Permanently.

2. Before uploading the optimised replacement image, make sure the image name is different from the one you’re replacing.

It can be different by one character (eg. Image01 instead of Image001 is fine), but it must be a unique image name. Or WordPress may not consistently show the new image in place of the old one.

Step 3

When you click Add to Gallery (in Step 2), your Media Library content will display. Click Upload Files to add new images. When you’re done, click the blue Add to gallery button.

When you add images, it’s advisable to make sure you have filled in the Image Title and Image Alt Text fields.

You could use “Your Business Name, Gallery Name” in both fields and do this for each image. Eg. Smart Eye Photography, Wedding Gallery. In this way, your branding will appear correctly (like in the carousel of the Thumbnail gallery). This is good SEO and it offers a good user experience.

Step 4

For the Carousel, the Gallery Settings should be:

Again, we’ve configured the settings for you. Should something change, you can restore them here.

Step 5

When you’re finished, make sure you select Update Gallery.

Step 6

Finally, make any other changes you need to the page and then click Update.