Prettier gallery display and navigation through core

[hew]

WordPress gallery display and navigation typically feels rather crude from the user point of view. With digital cameras dumping images as IMG_XXXX or long numeric strings, the default image titles are usually prominent and ugly in most of the themes I've tested (see attachments for examples). Some themes use thumbnail navigation instead, but those implementations also feel dated in many (most?) cases.

I realize that the theory is display/navigation is determined by the themes, and that display/navigation can be greatly altered via various plugins... but the reality of how this plays out results in a default user experience that simply feels outdated.

Many (most?) themes seem pretty unimaginative in their gallery output and IMHO a more elegant out-of-the-box display and navigation experience seems like it would really be useful for all WordPress users. I would think most users expect something like a Lightbox experience at minimum, but I am not ideologically tied to any particular solution.

Is there something we could do on the core side to strongly encourage (or even gently enforce) a prettier default construct?

[hew]

Ugly title and thumbs

[hew]

Ugly thumbs

[hew]

Ugly titles

[hew]

A very slick new carousel feature was released last month on WPCOM: ​http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2011/11/08/new-photo-carousel/

I would expect this via Jetpack someday, but IMHO it'd be neat to see this (or a descendant from it) mesh with core.

[jane]

That's really a slideshow, though, not a gallery. While it is very pretty, it's not what people expect with the label gallery, I could see adding as a slideshow, but then we've also talked about wanting the more advanced media stuff to remain in plugins, so we'll see.

[jane]

Also, this would be classified as a feature request, not an enhancement.

[hew]

A nice experience is now available via Jetpack 1.5: ​http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2012/07/12/around-the-carousel-again/

Closing as wontfix -- though I wish it were in core as I think most users expect something pretty out of the box here in 2012.

[nacin]

Re-opening this, as I think there may be some interest in some improvements here in core.

[celloexpressions]

This is definitely pretty heavily theme-influenced, but we could improve the default gallery styling as well as maybe implementing a better JS-based experience for navigating through the single views, which themes could reskin or opt out of.

Both Twenty Thirteen and Twenty Fourteen use the same (grid-view) gallery styling, so perhaps we could polish it (might need to improve the handling of captions, especially with touch, but that's the primary issue it addresses with the default styles) and make that the new default. For the single/flip-through view, I'm thinking improvements might still be plugin territory, but we could also build something cool there that themes could extend or opt-out of.

Don't know any of the history here, though, so it might make just as much sense to wontfix this again.

[Stagger Lee]

Ajax is heavy used in WP. Can it be used here ? To prevent page bouncing and refresh when browsing between images. From SEO perspective it is not important, as i see it. Styling can be left to themes.

[dd32]

#37663 was marked as a duplicate.

[desrosj]

I'm going to close this one out again.

A lot has changed since this ticket was created. The main change being a foundational shift to the block editor and full site editing with block-based themes. The way the layout of a gallery is configured and adjusted has changed drastically for the better by way of gallery, and image blocks. And I don't think there are any specific changes that can be made to the Core code base without requiring changes to ​block editor related code.

Shortcodes (though still supported) are no longer the recommended way to create a gallery.