I have a confession to make: My name is Jacky and I have Project gallery shame.

My current Project Gallery was, well just plain ugly. I’d been going nuts trying to find a decent gallery plugin but had no such luck. I finally gave in and used the free Inlinkz tool to create one. I saw some other blogs were using it and it looked pretty good. But I must have done something wrong because I couldn’t get rid of the lines surrounding the thumbnail photos. Plus I really wasn’t liking the way the captions looked either.

This is what I ended up with and had settled with:

Not too great, huh? I thought I had no other choice but to live with it…

That was until, I read Jackie’s (from Teal & Lime) post about her new DIY Project Gallery. She had found a great WordPress gallery plugin through Taryn from Design, Dining & Diapers. The plugin is called CataBlog  and Taryn has a great tutorial on using it: How To Create A Project Gallery For Your Blog.

It’s pretty easy, but does take a while to do and can get a bit confusing when it comes to the code part. Make sure to check out the comment Jackie left on Taryn’s tutorial before you start. It was very helpful.

Finding and uploading all the photos is probably the most time-consuming part. What I did to save some was to open each post that was going to go into the gallery one by one. Instead of digging through all my photos, I decided which photo I wanted for each thumbnail and saved it directly from the posts themselves into a new file folder I named 1 (so it would show up first in the file manager). That way you just upload all the photos into the CataBlog directory all at once. And you’ll have the posts handy because your going to have to link each photo to its corresponding post.

I didn’t have a problem changing the size of the thumbnails (as Jackie mentioned) once they were upload. I actually changed the size several times until I found a size I liked. But it’s probably a good idea to decide on a size before you start uploading photos, just in case.

So here’s my shiny new Project Gallery:

And I even created one for garden design & gardening:

Thanks Taryn and Jackie! I no longer have project gallery shame!

Next up, is to work on the To-Do list and create a Home Tour, which I don’t have.