Photos can add life to your blog and be the catalyst for getting a message across to your readers. Today, we launched new options for our WordPress.com galleries that allow you to create elegant magazine-style mosaic layouts for your photos–without having to use an external graphic editor.
When adding a gallery to your post, you now have the option to select a layout style for your images. We’ve added support for Rectangular, Square, and Circular galleries (take a look at the screenshots below for examples). By default, galleries will continue to display using the standard thumbnail grid layout. To switch to one of the new layouts, head over to Settings –> Media in your blog’s dashboard, scroll down to “Image Gallery Carousel,” and select the box next to “Display all your gallery pictures in a cool mosaic.”
Choosing this option makes the new look the default for all your blog’s galleries, old and new, without having to manually change each one of them. And they also should work great with all our themes!
If you’d like, you can also manage your galleries individually. Leave the box unchecked to keep the default thumbnail grid layout across your site. When you want to include one of the new galleries in a post, simply switch over to the ‘Text” tab in the post editor and add the code for the gallery style you want to use to the gallery shortcode text. Shortcodes for the new gallery layouts are:
[gallery type="rectangular"]
[gallery type="square"]
[gallery type="circle"]
The new galleries also allow you to set captions without taking space away from the images. Captions are hidden and slide into sight when you hover the image. You can check it out now: below you’ll find a demo of all of the new gallery layouts using images from our recent company meetup in San Diego!
Rectangular (default if you enable tiled galleries)
Square
Circular
Oh, and one more thing! We added support for mobile devices to our full-screen gallery carousel. Now you can view galleries on your smartphone and swipe to navigate.
We hope you find these galleries to be a neat new way to wow your readers and present your creations!
WordPress.com News 
Fantastic! Several lovely upgrades to the Gallery feature sure to inspire lots and lots of image posting. The addition of mobile Gallery support is another wonderful feature. Thanks so much for everything.
Oooh, those look fantastic! I’ve been doing a lot of photoblogging lately, so I’m going to have to try it out some time.
What a great surprise. Thanks for all your work…..
Great! I love this feature.
This is awesome guys, so sharp looking, a fantastic addition!
These new options for galleries are great. I am going to try them.
Thanks for the instructions.
I do appreciate all your efforts!
It works for tablet too, right?
It depends on the theme. Most will work.
Reblogged this on 12-inch pianist and commented:
Fancy new tiled galleries! One of our San Diego meetup projects.
Fantastic and useful!
I tried it and the result is GREAT! I am so excited. It is really lovely!
Make changes manually worked for me better.
But:
1. Why does it take a long time to load? Does it make the page heavy to load? I hope I haven’t uploaded something the wrong way.
2. What if I add new images to my page? Should I insert the shortcodes each time again?
(My gallery page will be be updated gradually.)
Thanks again.
Thanks!
You only need to insert the shortcode once. The new Tiled Gallery will find a place for it.
Feel free to delete this comment after fixing: the link from the Gallery support doc (Check out examples of all three layout options in this post.) is a 404.
Thanks for the note! I double checked it just now and found it was updated on the 4th.
Reallyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy awesome! I’m too glad that I use for blogging the WordPress.com blogging platform, WordPress.com makes me happy with its new updates, keep up the good work 😀
Does this new look for circle or square galleries only work with just 3 columns?
Yes, the columns in tiled galleries vary up to three columns depending on the number of images.
I LOVE this! You guys are just the BEST. Woo hoo, WordPress!
I don’t think words can express how ridiculously stoked I am about this new feature. Be right back, there’s a rooftop waiting for me, on which I plan to sing the praises of these sweet new gallery layouts until the neighbors shut me up.
They just make your photos look really cool!
I so love this.. thank you bringing it up 🙂 so much adds to my blogging style.. love it.
Thank you.
Can images in my gallery be linked to another post, page or other gallery on my blog? I’m creating a directory and love these galleries but need to give viewers options to get more information (e.g. click on BUSINESS CATEGORY image, get gallery of businesses in that category) … or view the BUSINESSES gallery; click on image to view business-specific landing page.
There is not a way to point gallery images to outside links at this time.
Thank you WordPress… these new layouts are wonderful.
Fabulous! Totally stoked! 🙂 Looking forward to giving this one a go! Hope it’s as easy to use as the other graphic editor I’ve used in the past. I love that rectangular format! 🙂
If you check the Media setting in your dashboard, you would just need to upload your pictures and insert a gallery 🙂
Awesome. TY Matías! 🙂
Oh this is perfect!
Great invention. It makes photo gallery look fantastic. Well done!
Perfect timing! I’ve been searching for an external photo gallery that I could either include or link to. I’ve been using your photo gallery a lot in my posts, so this is going to be even better! Thank you for doing this!
Love the new gallery! Definitely prefer it to the previous one.
Thanks Dan. I’ve been wanting to know how to do this.
The new gallery format looks great. Thanks!
Thank you! I’ve made my Happy Gallery!
This looks great. Thanks for the instructions I must try this;)
Support for 3.4.2-de_DE ??
We will probably release tiled galleries on Jetpack in the future, so keep an eye the Jetpack blog for updates.
Thank you Dan. These features are cool. I’ve applied them. Many thanks.
I ran of things to say good, so I’m sticking with Wow!!
Thanks for this! Lovely!
Normally, i always upload single pictures on my blog. But this feature made me decide to share galleries too. Great for photo based blogs!
Rectangular is very stylish and i think it will be my favorite.
Thanks for the comment. Glad you like it!
I just tried the rectangular gallery on today’s “animal” post, and I love it. Just gotta remember to make sure all photo information is correct b/c I can’t change it later (like I often do), and also to delete the photos after the gallery is created, otherwise they show up again, individually below the gallery.
this is really great!
WHOOPY!! I’m going to have fin! 😉 Thanks…
I am beyond psyched to use this new feature!
Excellent news! The nine square format looks very clean and fresh. Thanks.
Hurray! It worked…on my first attempt. Life is good.
This was really great, having a challenge that helped us learn something new! Thanks WordPress staff!
Thanks Dan, super cool!
This is purely brilliant!! You guys at WP are amazing!!! Thank you very very much! ;D
Great news but for some reason it doesn’t work for me! The photos look in different sized (despite the fact that they all have the same size) and it looks pretty messy 😦 Could this be because of the theme I’m using? My theme is Fresh & Clean. Thanks!
One of the best new features. I got into galleries a few months ago, and they looked, I don’t know, ‘scraggly’. The new formatting is tidy and interesting. Love it! Thanks!
So I clicked the box under Settings>media>“Display all your gallery pictures in a cool mosaic.”>Save and nothing changed. Will this take affect with only new posts or can it change older posts to? I’m currently using Twenty Ten. Thank you in advance.
If you check the option it will apply for every gallery you have posted. I see it working fine in your blog.
Thank you, I finally got it working yesterday afternoon! 🙂
Thank you, I finally got it working yesterday afternoon! 🙂 It also depends how you load your photos into the post.
Cool, I can revisit the beauty of my photos in some gallery entries.
So cool! Love the rectangular option!
@Veselin
Many thanks for your attention & reply.
The best thing to come out of WordPress in many a long time. Well done.
I wasn’t happy with how my rectangular gallery came out. Perhaps I did something wrong but I did not like the way it resized my pictures to undesirable sizes and added scrollbars. I need more control of my output.
Have you contacted support? The scrollbars sound like a possible bug with your theme.
Is this the answer to inserting multiple images? Because I still find it tedious to post more than five images one-by-one.
You can drag and drop multiple images to create galleries. Also, stay tuned as more improvements will be happening on that front!
Thanks, this is really great !!
I cannot find this option in media gallery.
I see this option in making new post on one of my blogs, but I don’t see it on my second blog (the one I’m logged in to now). What can I do? I enabled it in settings.
Cool and easy, works like magic! Thank you again WordPress!
Looks great! I will have to give it a try.
Yay! Now I won’t have to go through the trouble of making the photo collages myself.
These new upgrades to streamlining photos is really cool. This reminds me of the app on the iPhone where you can put a bunch of photos together into one photo block. This is a great upgrade for blogging because they are staying up-to-date with the new current trends. I have seen a lot of the rectangle photo streams on Facebook. I have never seen the new feature of the circles. I think this will be a really big hit and people will enjoy doing it because people will be able to crop pictures and make them look the way they want in a circle. This is a great upgrade for WordPress because it gives your blog a personal, magazine style look. It is cool to see that people are trying it out on their blog and that Matias is able to help everyone and get back to them in a quick timely manner. The Good Villager- I agree with you that this is the best new feature on WordPress. I think its going to be a great success!
Best thing since sliced bread! Awesome!
Cool! Now I don’t have to use other collage apps. Does it work with the awesome WP apps?
This is super awesome! Thank you for this great feature! Question: is there a way I can disable the “view full size” function for the individual photos? Thanks again.
There is not a way to disable it in the settings, but you can adjust built in design like that using CSS if you purchase a Custom Design upgrade. If you need help, go to the CSS Forum for help.
Reblogged this on Jason Uzarraga and commented:
This is great for all of you using WP as your website host.
This may be a dumb question, and I am new to WordPress, but you wrote, “When adding a gallery to your post, you now have the option to select a layout style for your images.” So how do you create a photo gallery in the first place?
When you insert media into your post, you have the option of making a gallery of images. See the support doc for inserting a gallery.
Can you please tell us how we can get this on Self Hosted WordPress Blogs? This is amazing!!!
Stay tuned! It’s going to be available in Jetpack soon.
Wow this is cool! M favorite are rectangular because I love how it places. 😉 Sweet. Might be use soon.
Used the code on my weekly photo challenge today. Worked great! Thanks for the info and really like the rectangle effect!
So much better than the old style – the captions in particular discouraged me from using gallery. This is great, thanks!
I like this feature a lot!
Hi there! How come my images are different sizes when uploaded into the gallery even though they’re all “thumbnail” sized?
The image sizes in tiled galleries are variable by design—they adjust to fit into one block.
Fantastic ! At the right time for my new photo blog – coming soon … (11/2012)
AutoFocus extended, thanks!
I love this feature but my rectangular gallery only displays 3 columns not 2 like in the post above. What am I doing wrong? This is what the text reads: [gallery type="rectangular" order="DESC" columns="2"]
The the number of columns in tiled galleries varies to make the images all fit into one block. You cannot change the number of tiled gallery columns using the shortcode like you could with the previous galleries.
Thanks!
Hi! This gallery is amazing! Thank you!
Is it possible in WordPress installation on my domain not hosted by WordPress.com?
Michela
Not yet. It will probably be added to Jetpack at some point though.
Sorry! I’ve just read pete716’s comment…we’ll wait for it!
I like. That sliding-in thing is really a nifty update.
I don’t understand how this works. When can I use it and how? I already changed my settings but I’m not so sure how to use this feature.
It will work automatically galleries on your blog once you have changed the setting. See https://wordpress.com/support/images/gallery/ to learn how to add galleries.
Thank you! I understand how it works now.
Reblogged this on Ask Dent and commented:
Some great photos.
Hi Dan, do you think there will be a time soon when we can upload multiple galleries into one post? I would like to be able to insert one gallery with a few pics, then write a bit about the photos in the gallery, then insert another, then another, so on… why is this option not available? Right now, it seems the only way to insert a gallery is to insert all of the photos you want to display in one single gallery. thanks- Lynn
Great question. In the past, WordPress itself only had a way to insert one gallery at a time. That has been changed recently, and now you can upload multiple galleries into one post. To do it, just go through the same process to add a gallery each time and clear the previous selection of images before re-selecting and inserting a new gallery.
Love it! Just a question though, is it possible to have mulitple galleries in one post? For example, you are talking about a before and after type situation…you upload your pics,, seems like they all get put into gallery. is there a way to separate the 2?
A recent update to WordPress made it possible to add multiple galleries to one post. Give it another try.