User blog:Kirkburn/Photo gallery launch

Good morning!

As part of our commitment to making wikis easier to use, we're introducing a new way to add photos to your wiki, Photo Galleries.

What are photo galleries?
Photo galleries allow you to collect and display multiple images together anywhere on a page. You can add captions, define destination links and adjust the sizes to fit any page type.

Photo galleries have existed on Wikia for a while, but we have now created a wizard to allow you to quickly create them from the editor without knowing any advanced wiki code. However, we have made some improvements to how they work.

How to create a gallery?
Add a new gallery - there is a new toolbar button in the "Insert" section: - click this to add a new gallery! From here, you can go through the steps on the wizard to upload or choose existing photos on the wiki, add captions, create links to articles, and chose the size.

Edit an existing gallery - when viewing an article you can click the "add to existing gallery" which will take you into the wizard.

Advanced users, take note!
Experienced users will likely notice these updates:


 * Photos in a gallery can now link to specific pages - for example, a picture of Kermit could link to his article page. This works in a similar fashion to standalone images.
 * When you click on photos that don't link to a specific page, you are given a lightbox popup instead of being taken to the image details page. You can still reach that page by clicking the icon at the bottom right of the lightbox
 * Galleries now resize depending on the page layout (instead of having a fixed number of columns). You can still override this if needed using wikitext.
 * You can set the caption alignment for an entire gallery.
 * Photo sizing has changed slightly - galleries previously had widths and heights options - we have simplified this to use widths for both directions.
 * The placeholder for a gallery in the rich text editor has been updated.

What's next?
Looking to the future, we are planning on introducing slideshow functionality and videos. Your feedback is most welcome, and will help us decide how to further develop photo galleries.

Note: today's launch is for all English wikis - other languages will arrive when translation is completed.