How to Add an Image Gallery to Your Sidebar in WordPress

A default installation of WordPress provides little in the way of sidebar customization options, and while there are some widgets available, there is no obvious way to add an image gallery to the sidebar in your blog. Although the text widget allows you to add images and other content through the use of HTML coding, it is not a particularly user-friendly method. However, to easily add a small thumbnail image gallery to your blog, so that it appears on every page of your website, you can use a plugin. For this tutorial, we will use the “Gallery Widget” plugin.

 

1. In your WordPress administrator dashboard, open the “Plugins” tab and click “Add New”. Enter “Gallery Widget” into the search box and click “Search Plugins”. Click “Install Now” below the plugin at the top of the search results. Click “OK” to confirm, wait for the plugin to download and install and click “Activate Plugin” to continue.
2. Open the “Appearance” tab from the sidebar and click “Widgets” to open the Widgets section. Drag the new Gallery Widget to your preferred widget area in the right-side column. Click on it to configure the settings.
3. Enter a name for the page element and specify the number of images to display and the order. You can also customize a variety of more advanced options which allow you to exclude specific image categories. In the section entitled “Image size,” you can also choose from a list of predefined image sizes, though the default thumbnail setting will be suitable for most. Note that you can also add additional custom sizes by using the add_image_size function in the functions.php file of your currently active theme.
4. Once you have customized your settings, click “Save”. The gallery will appear on your blog immediately.
5. You can add multiple copies of the Gallery Widget to your blog if you like, so that each one displays a different set of images on your sidebar.
   Add Img Gallery

There are also a number of simpler plugins available which allow you to add solitary images to the sidebar on your WordPress blog. One such plugin is “Image Widget”. You can add multiple instances of this widget with each one displaying a single static image.

Another popular plugin for adding image-related widgets to your sidebar is the Photo Gallery plugin. In addition to allowing you to add a permanent photo gallery preview to your sidebar, you can also choose to display a miniature photo slideshow using photos from your WordPress media library.