The NextGen Gallery plugin for Wordpress is widely used and offers enough options to fit almost any needs.  Because of this I won't be able to cover all of the functions in one tutorial so we will stick to creating and managing galleries and uploading images to those galleries in this walkthrough.

1. Once you login to your Wordpress dashboard, expand the Gallery menu option near the bottom of the left-hand navigation and check out your options.  We are going to select Add Gallery / Images for this walkthrough.

2. Now we are given four options.  We want the first so we will leave the other three alone for now.  They are pretty self-explanatory so don't be afraid to jump in to them.  Write your new gallery name into the box and click Add Gallery.

3. The successful creation of the gallery will be shown by a box appearing above.  Take note of the tag that it shows you here!  Simply copy and paste this tag into a Wordpress post or page to display the gallery.

4. Now we need to add some images to our new gallery.  Select the Upload Images tab above.

5. First select which gallery you would like to upload images to.  We will choose our newly created gallery Sample Gallery.  Next click the 'Browse' button to select the images to upload.

6. Navigate through your computer to find the images that you wish to upload.  You can select multiple images by holding down shift while you click on the images.  When you've selected all the images that you need, click Select or hit enter.

7. Now you well see a list of images selected.  You can remove any images or change the gallery now.  But if it all looks good to you simply click Upload Images.

8. As the images upload, you will be shown the progress above.

9. Now that we have successfully created a new gallery and added images to it, we need to make some changes.  Look back down to the bottom left side the navigation where we started.  Click on 'Manage Gallery'.

10. This will take you to the 'Gallery Overview' where you will see a rough overview of all of your galleries.  Click on the name of the gallery that you want to edit.  In this case I will click on 'Sample Gallery'.

11. Now we can see and edit basically anything about our new gallery.  But to keep this short, I'll focus on the two most important options.

12. Each image has a text box for the Alt and Title tag and for the Description.  The first text box is for the Alt and Title.  Basically, the text you put in here serves three main functions.

1. This text will appear when someone places their mouse over the image.
2. This text is used by screen readers for the visually impaired (so it should accurately describe the image!)
3. This text is what Google (and other search engines) will see in place of the image.

So you can see how leaving the Title text as 09 would be shameful.  The second text box is for the image description.  The image description may or may not be displayed depending on how your Wordpress theme is designed.

13. The other important function is the ability to sort the images in the gallery.  Click on Sort Gallery to be taken to the sorting page.

14. Here we have several set options including the ID, Filename, Alt/Title Text and the Date/Time it was uploaded.  With each of these options you have the ability to set whether it is sorted Ascending or Descending.  But most importantly you can also drag and drop the images to sort them in any way you like.  And when you are finished sorting, simply click Update Sort Order to save the new positioning.

And that is it!  The quick and dirty run through of adding a new gallery in NextGen, adding images and editing the images and sorting order.  In roughly five minutes you can create a full gallery and have it displayed on your website.  It doesn't get much easier than that!

Download the NextGen Plugin from the Wordpress Plugin Directory:  NextGen Gallery

See all of the allowed template tag and allowed functions on the plugin's author's website: NextGen How-To's