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Another WordPress tutorial!!!
Andy from Tokyo, Japan writes in asking:

Could you please tell me how you added the text navigation links to your gallery? I would be grateful… …Thank you.

Sure Andy, No problem, but first a little bit of background for everyone else:

Gallery Shortcode

WordPress version 2.5 added an exciting and very awesome feature: The Gallery Shortcode. This feature allows blog authors to add a gallery of thumbnails to their blog posts. Each one of these thumbnails is linked to an individual page which displays a larger version of the image and any other information that has been associated with that image (title, description, comments, etc…). A new template file was added to the WordPress Default theme to display single images. This template file is called image.php.

Image.php?

If your current theme does not have an image.php file, I would suggest that you visit your theme’s homepage and see if a new version has been released for 2.5+. If no new version is available, you can save a copy of the WordPress default theme’s image.php file to your current theme’s directory and modify it match your current theme.

Changing to Text Based Navigation

Now that everyone has a working image.php file in their current theme’s directory, it’s time get rid of those clunky thumbnail links! Unfortunately, I was not able to find any template tags which offered text-based links, so I had to create my own:

function mf_previous_image_link( $link_text ) {
    print mf_adjacent_image_link( $link_text, true );
}
 
function mf_next_image_link( $link_text ) {
    print mf_adjacent_image_link( $link_text, false );
}
 
function mf_adjacent_image_link( $link_text, $prev = true ) {
    global $post;
    $post = get_post($post);
    $attachments = array_values(get_children("post_parent=$post->post_parent&post_type=attachment&post_mime_type=image&orderby=\"menu_order ASC, ID ASC\""));
 
    foreach ( $attachments as $k => $attachment )
        if ( $attachment->ID == $post->ID )
            break;
 
    $k = $prev ? $k - 1 : $k + 1;
 
    if ( isset($attachments[$k]) )
        return '<a href="' . get_attachment_link( $attachments[$k]->ID ) . '">' . $link_text . '</a>';
	else
		return false;
}

You’ll want to paste the above code into your theme’s functions.php file. If your theme does not have a functions.php file, you can make one from scratch. Basically, I have copied a few functions from a core wordpress file, gave each one a unique name and modified them to suite my needs.

The next step is to locate the following code in your image.php file:

<div class="navigation">
	<div class="alignleft"><?php previous_image_link() ?></div>
	<div class="alignright"><?php next_image_link() ?></div>
</div>

Change the above code to:

<div class="navigation">
	<div class="alignleft"><?php mf_previous_image_link( 'Previous Image' ) ?></div>
	<div class="alignright"><?php mf_next_image_link( 'Next Image' ) ?></div>
</div>

Save both image.php and functions.php and upload them to your server. You should now have text-based navigation links for all of your WordPress Galleries.

Image Page Template Hierarchy

The list below illustrates the logic WordPress uses to determine which template file will display the the larger images in your theme. Basically, WordPress first looks for image.php if it is found, it is used, if not, attachment.php is used. Wordpress will try to locate each file in the list before it defaults to index.php.

1. image.php
2. attachment.php
3. single.php
4. index.php

In Conclusion

I hope this helps you out Andy (and whoever else might be reading). Feel free to leave questions in the comments section. Thanks for visiting!

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