As I travel (or have travelled 🦠) a fair bit, adding image galleries to my blog was always a bit of a challenge (I’m just not a fan of using shortcodes or bloated plugins) and put me off adding blog posts about my little adventures.

That is until the release of Gutenberg. Gutenberg has made it easier than ever to create bespoke pages using WordPress without the need for third party page builders, or plugins anymore, and the ability to add image galleries is now effortless.

One key part of making this process perfect is adding the ability of organising images into groups. It’s all well and good adding a few travel blog posts and a few dozen images to the media library, but it soon becomes unmanageable and messy.

As WordPress unfortunately doesn’t support native categorisation of media files, I do need to use a plugin for this job. My recommendation is Mediamatic, it’s fast loading, affordable, and I’ve had no issues with it. As I am a Jetpack user, I also take advantage of its stellar tile image gallery.

1. Creating Groups of images

When you install Mediamatic, it adds a nicely integrated skin in the media library.

You can easily create ‘folders’ in the left hand side section, and also sub folders – very nifty!

So, I just create a folder for each blog post that I would like a gallery to show on, and then drag and drop images from the main library into the desired folder.

2. Add in the Jetpack tiled gallery block to a blog post

Once I am happy with my folder of images, I then create my blog post and go about adding this tiled gallery block in.

Then I select the images I would like to displayed in this gallery. As we have created folders with Mediamatic, I simply choose the folder I would like to add, and then select each of the images for the gallery.

Then watch as the gallery is created for you. The great thing about this approach is that even though we have created folders, we are not pigeonholed by only using this these images. We can order the gallery how we like, remove images and even add new photos in.

And there you have it, my way of creating flexible galleries for my blog posts.