After returning back from WordCamp Columbus, we wanted to post some photos on the site. In the past, we have used Flickr for event photos. However, once we logged into Flickr, it turned out that Flickr has changed their business model. You must upgrade to a PRO account, or you are limited to 200 photos ONLY. We decided to start using the built-in WordPress gallery (not sure why we didn’t do this to begin with). Anyways, it turned out that the Native jQuery Lightbox plugin that we recommended in that article has been discontinued in favor of Jetpack. Well that was sort of a bummer. We decided to open Jetpack to test out the carousel feature, and it was totally mind-blowing. The carousel transformed the standard gallery into an immersive full-screen experience with easy navigation, and comments. We knew we wanted this feature in our site however the worst part about JetPack is that it disables all its features unless you connect with WordPress.com (even when you don’t have to). Out of frustration, we decided to fork the carousel module and turned it into an independent plugin. In this article, we will show you how to add a beautiful gallery carousel in WordPress without JetPack.
First thing you need to do is install and activate the plugin called Gallery Carousel without Jetpack.
Once activated, go to Settings » Media. You should see a section called Image Gallery Carousel.
Select whether you want the black background or white background. We personally like the black background. The other 2 options are pretty self-explanatory. Once you have configured this.
Simply go to a post or page, and add a gallery.
Demo
The pictures are of Lilly (part of WPBeginner family). Click on the images to launch the carousel.
Download Gallery Carousel without Jetpack
Note: if you already have a WordPress.com account, and you want to use Jetpack for all the other features it offer, then you DO NOT need this plugin.
Hey there-
Loving your plugin, but our site functions largely off of comments and REPLIES made on images. Is there a way to enable a REPLY button and display NESTED comment/reply threads?
Would really appreciate your help
Best,
SL
Hey great plugin! Thank you!
Q: How do I delete comment and “showing of name” functions?
Again Thanks!
This article should help:
http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-disable-comments-on-wordpress-media-attachments/
Did anyone find out how to add some “like-buttons” to the carousel? I would really appreciate some help there!
Hello
i do’t have any section Image Gallery Carousel on my wordpress website (version 3.5.1)
How come?
thank you?
Nadege
Is there a way this could be apply to custom post type? I have a custom post type “gallery” with separate custom galley template in my theme.
I test this plugin using normal post or page and it works fine, but I have problem with custom post type.
Hoping forward to hear from you soon.
Rey
Hi Guys
How do you apply the lightbox effect to a single image – do you have to give the image a class or does it only work with a gallery/
I installed this plugin and my photo’s aren’t opening in the gallery carousel. I have no idea why… and i’m not sure where to even start troubleshooting.
Sounds like a problem with your theme. First place to start would be to see if the Carousel jQuery scripts are being loaded in the footer. In your browser, view source to verify that.
Hi there Syed
I love your plugin but since i installed new theme, itstopped working. I checked the source, and the jquery seems to be loading correctly. Would you mind checking? Go to jardimdecalateia.com.br and click on a post called tree horizon, you will see the galery without lightbox effect. Thnx
Any chance you’ll add support for the gallery styles enabled in Jetpack?
I posted an issue this morning, and for some reason you did not accept it. Maybe it was the link I attached, but I attached it, so I can have someone look at the issue for me. This time, I will not post the link.
Your plugin doesn’t work in IE7 or older versions of Firefox, and I’d like some feedback on how to fix it. The images do not float to where they are supposed to be. They are just stacked on top of each other in the left side of the gallery.
Please respond, thank you.
Hey Michael, like most businesses we are not very active on weekends, so this is the reason why you didn’t hear back. This plugin is a ditto copy of the one in JetPack. The same bugs that exist in the Jetpack plugin will exist in this plugin. The reason why we created this plugin was to give freedom to those users who don’t want to connect with WP.com, but still use the carousel feature that is in JetPack.
There are other feature requests and bug fixes, but we have restrained from taking action on those. Mainly because that would make the update process very hard. We want to keep the plugin exactly as the one in JetPack. So everytime JetPack updates, we can update our plugin to match that.
I installed this plugin today and it did work in Firefox v17, however the same was not true for IE9. When clicking on an image in a gallery the image would not appear, however there would be a lighter image that was next in the slideshow that displayed. But the main was never brought to focus in the center like it showed in Firefox.
Also, I forgot to mention that I am running WPTouch and the plugin works here, but not on the desktop.
Thanks!
Thanks u very much…im pissed of with jetpack
Hi, thankyou for this plug-in. I have search for something like it for time…
I want to ask you: I put in my gallery picture medium size (less than 700 px lenght) and I don’t like the distance from the picture in the center of the monitor and the one before / the one after… I mean: is it possibile to reduce the distance? I imagine it has to be fluid… and I can’t find where to change the code… to make picture closer the one to the others
many thanks
Lorenza
You would have to modify the CSS File.
be patient… I’m trying to focus where to modify the css property, but I can’t find. Can you please point out where which css property control distance between the images?
thankyou
Lorenza
This Carousel plugin interferes with the back button on Chrome, Firefox and Safari (but oddly, not IE). If you open a carousel and browse a few images. then close it, try to use the browser back button and you’ll see you have to click it multiple times to page through the various anchors for each image you viewed before you’re actually taken back to the page you came from.
The JetPack Carousel has the same problem. You can see this for yourself using the sample gallery in this post.
Any ideas on how to fix?
I’m having the same problem; once in the Carousel view, there is no easy way to close it and return to the gallery page. Using the back button a couple of times skips the gallery page; using the “x” at the top left of the image simply takes you to the full-sized image view, and you have to scroll down to the bottom right of the page to find another “x” and close that too. Pressing escape does the trick, but there’s no way to alert visitors to my site of that.
Instead of having to have a whole bunch of thumbnails with Carousel, is there a way just to have the thumbnails be invisible and have a button that says something like “Click to see the gallery” which would launch Carousel and display the invisible images full size?
Hope that makes sense.
David
Yes. When you click on the gallery thumbnail, the URL of the page changes. For example, if you click on this post’s gallery thumb it shows the URL like this:
http://www.wpbeginner.com/plugins/how-to-add-gallery-carousel-in-wordpress-without-jetpack/#jp-carousel-7912 << You can create an anchor tag with a link like this, and it would work.
Hi – this post is a few months old at the point of my writing this, but I’m hoping someone will see it and respond. After the latest update to “carousel without jetpack”, the gallery viewer no longer works in IE, though it did before. Out of curiosity, I went to the “regular” jetpack 1.5 carousel gallery example page, and their latest version doesn’t work in IE either. It was working before on my website and I love it. It still works just fine in FX, Chrome and Safari. My website is http://gjfoto.com and it’s a photography website, so lots and lots of photos – none of which are showing in IE! (Sigh!) Any suggestions?
The carousel without jetpack plugin is literally the copy of the carousel plugin that lives in Jetpack. Except this doesn’t require you to connect with WP.com. I made a commitment to keep up with the updates. Whenever Jetpack updates their plugin, I try to update this one. You can always revert back to the old version.
When I view the gallery on this page from my iPhone, it has large images and the previous/next arrows are smaller. It looks really great! When I downloaded this plugin and looked at my gallery on the iPhone, it as small images and huge previous/next arrows. Did you tweak the settings?
No, but some settings can vary from theme to theme.
I have this problem too! And using twenty twelve – this doesn’t happen on the twenty twelve demo on wordpress.com… Something in the plugin seems different…
I’m seeing it too – it’s like it won’t shrink the arrows, titles, and other controls. The only thing it shrinks is the images.
Hello, first thank you for this great plugin.
I wonder how I can get a “LIKE” button in the slideshow and disable the “view full size” button.
Because I see the like button in your screen shot from your plugin page.
Thanks you
The screenshot is from WordPress.com feature. We didn’t take a new screenshot for the plugin.
I see, but I still thinking how I can add a like or share box in it manually. I really like the LIKE box. XD
hey Max . did you ever get an answer on your request?
adding a like or share seems not to be possible yet..?
It is definitely possible by modifying the plugin core file. We just don’t have it added by default. It may be possible with filters to, but haven’t looked at it that closely. As the article says, we didn’t write this plugin. We simply took the code out of jetpack and put it out independently. The main reason behind that decision was that we didn’t like being forced to connect to WP.com to use the carousel feature that was entirely independent.
Hi There firstly thank you very much for this plugin my problem is when try to add a comment under photos i am getting this error
Sorry, but there was an error posting your comment. Please try again later.
is there any solution for this error?
Not sure why that error could be happening. Doesn’t happen on our website. Perhaps a conflict with another plugin?
Hi, I have a related question:
Does this and/or the Jetpack gallery plugin make the photo views count as page views? Like the slideshows that we see on Mashable.com or Complex.com
Thanks,
Joan
Don’t think that it does.
I installed this plugin because the JetPack wasn’t working. This one is also not working..in the settings page, I’m not getting the “Display images in full-size carousel” option, just as I wasn’t before. Is it possible its conflicting with my theme? (I’m using the Oxygen theme through WordPress). Any help you could offer would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!
Yes, it is probably because a conflict of JS between this plugin and your theme. Or this plugin and another plugin.
Hi, I am also facing same issue. I’m also not getting the “Display images in full-size carousel” option. I am just messed up because Lightbox for native galleries is also not working with wordpress 3.4.2
Please HELP….
Great plugin, I’ve been looking for something like this for…ages.
Once user clicks the thumbnail to open up carousel,
How can I display the Image title, or description or both?
When adding an image, simply add the title, description, and caption there. The carousel will detect it and show it.
Hi, like the concept, just trying to get it to work! When I update/refresh the gallery (from one that was already in place as a basic one), I get the carousel pop up, with the close, left and right arrows etc, but none of the images! Could you explain if I am doing something wrong please? Or missing a little trick or two?
Hmm… That’s weird. Shoot us an email using the contact form with a link to where this issue is happening. Would be happy to take a look at it.
Thank you so much for doing this! I also really appreciate your comment in the plugin repository that you’ll update your plugin as JetPack updates.
thank you! great idea to simplify the plugin I do not like the comments in the gallery no way to disable?
You can disable it by modifying the core plugin files. We might consider adding a checkbox to disable comments in the future updates.
Any pointers on doing this? I achieved it by adding display none to CSS but still get the “Loading comments” and doesn’t feel like a good solution.
Could work out which part of the php or js file to comment out to disable the comments system.
I thought long and hard about this issue. But concluded that it wasn’t worth adding another option in the plugin. The whole point of the plugin is to add an immersive experience with engagement. You can disable comments for the media post type, but I think it still tries to load the comment first and then just can’t. The comments area is highlighted in the php file. You just have to comment it out. There are two specific functions for it I think.
-Syed
Syed is wrong!!!
Most artists do not want extra junk surrounding their art work !!!
Get rid of the comments.
Viewers can critique on our other pages.
Great tip! It’s been tweeted!
Hi,
I did everything mentioned to the tee. I still coulnot get it running.
I am uploading galleries by the native shortcode. Plugin is all activated and running.
Still, this feature is not working for my posts. Help, please?
Also, I love your blog. Absolutely life saving help.
Not sure what’s going on. Please use the WordPress.org support forum for asking any support questions.
Sorry I’m very much a beginner so forgive this question – can I only use this plug-in for new galleries or can I somehow get it to work with my existing ones? It does look very good.
AC.
It will work on existing and new galleries as long as you are using the built-in WordPress gallery shortcode.
can you use this on a self hosted WP site – off on it’s own domain? or is this just for WP.com sites?
Many thanks! great looking gallery!
This is ONLY for self-hosted WordPress sites. WP.com have their own version of this.
looks nice i love it….its very smooth…will implement it as i have a lot of images on my blog…just one question this wont create a conflict with the lazy load plugin by automattic ryt? sometimes i hav run into trouble when using gallery plugins and lazy load together…
Not sure if it will or not. You have to try it to see. We don’t try our plugins with all tens of thousands of plugins in the repository.
Thanks so much…this is awesome! Lilly is ADORABLE and is a well-traveled pooch
Thanks Jan. Yup she is amazing. We need to put more pictures of our second puppy that we got named Lora. She is named after the font we are using at WPBeginner.
A puppy named after a font?
Has to be a first. lol
I just checked it out on mobile, and it does a good job on smaller screens as well. Nicely done! I’m going to use this on a project this weekend.
Thanks Syed
I’m looking for something like this for a client site where I have to display a few photo galleries.
More than likely the thumbnails for each gallery will be different sizes
Can the built-in WordPress gallery function create different sized thumbnails for each gallery?
Unfortunately the built-in WordPress gallery doesn’t let you choose different thumbnail sizes for specific galleries. They’ll all display based on your Media settings for Thumbnails.
Thanks Caitlin.
No there is no way to control the thumbnail sizes. It’s the one size that is specified in your theme.
Are there gallery plugins that will allow you to set thumbnail sizes on a gallery by gallery basis?
I have been playing with Nextgen, but the documentation is very poor.
Just to clarify, you CAN have galleries with different sizes of thumbnails. See the codex: http://codex.wordpress.org/Gallery_Shortcode
It says “specify the image size to use for the thumbnail display. Valid values include “thumbnail”, “medium”, “large”, “full” and any other additional image size that was registered with add_image_size(). The default value is “thumbnail”. The size of the images for “thumbnail”, “medium” and “large” can be configured in WordPress admin panel under Settings > Media. For example, to display a gallery of medium sized images:
[gallery size="medium"]
You can get really creative with this.
There is no close button.
And what is significant about not having to use one plugin if you just have to use another plugin?
I think you missed the point
The point was that he didn’t want to connect Jetpack to wordpress.com and didn’t need the other features. This plugin is slimmer and doesn’t require that connection for those who don’t need the other stuff.
Jetpack is an amazing plugin. But it requires you to authenticate with WP.com. However, there are features in Jetpack that can work without that authentication. They just lock those features by default, so you MUST signup with a WP.com account to use this plugin on your self-hosted blog. We just didn’t want to do that. Also, JetPack comes with 12+ modules… this is just one module, so a lot less bulky.
Forgot to answer. The close button is to your top left.
Ok – a few more questions:
1) when I go to Settings > Media, there is no checkbox for me to mark to enable the Gallery Carousel. There is only the option to choose what color. Does that mean it is enabled by default?
2) Can other gallery plugins conflict with this? I’ve been experimenting with different ones to see which I like most, and have both Smugmug and NextGEN Gallery Plugins installed.
Yes, it is enabled by default. It goes after the gallery shortcode, and converts those into this cool full screen carousel. Not sure if this works with Smugmug or NextGen.
That was going to be my next question… does it work with Nextgen?
Thanks for answering queries guys.
Just to make sure – if we have Jetpack enabled, this won’t cause any problems, right?
If you have JetPack enabled, this shouldn’t cause any problems as of version 0.2 because we cleared up that conflict. However, if you have JetPack enabled, then you shouldn’t have this plugin to begin with.
Oh, ok. Thank you!
Awesome. Love the gallery, don’t really want jetpack. This is perfect.
Flickr has limited ‘regular’ accounts to 200 publicly available photos since 2006 – if not earlier. [I will add that that's just a restriction on what can be seen in your photostream - any additional photos are still hosted on flickr and can stlil be seen if people know the url].
Oh wow. I guess I didn’t know about that. We never went over the 200 photos until now when it started giving me a nag. Yes, the photos were hidden on Flickr, which was why we decided to switch away.
-Syed