How to Add an Image Gallery to Your Sidebar in WordPress

The default setup of WordPress offers limited options for customizing the sidebar. While there are some available widgets, it’s not immediately clear how to add a photo gallery to the sidebar of your blog. Although the text widget allows you to insert images and other content using HTML coding, it may not be the most user-friendly method. However, you can easily incorporate a small thumbnail image gallery into your blog using a plugin. In this tutorial, we will utilize the “Gallery Widget” plugin.

1. In your WordPress administrator dashboard, go to the “Plugins” tab and click on “Add New”. Type “Gallery Widget” into the search field and hit the “Search Plugins” button. Click on “Install Now” below the plugin at the top of the search results. Confirm by clicking “OK”, wait for the plugin to download and install, and then click “Activate Plugin” to proceed.
2. Navigate to the “Appearance” tab on the sidebar and select “Widgets” to access the Widgets section. Drag the newly added Gallery Widget to your preferred widget area in the right-side column. Click on it to configure the settings.
3. Provide a name for the page element and specify the number of images to display and their order. You can also customize various advanced options that allow you to exclude specific image categories. In the “Image size” section, you can choose from a list of predefined image sizes, although the default thumbnail setting will be suitable for most cases. Note that you can also add additional custom sizes by utilizing the add_image_size function in the functions.php file of your currently active theme.
4. Once you have personalized your settings, click “Save”. The gallery will immediately appear on your blog.
5. If desired, you can add multiple copies of the Gallery Widget to your blog, each displaying a different set of images in your sidebar.
   

There are also several simpler plugins available that enable you to incorporate individual images into the sidebar of your WordPress blog. One such plugin is “Image Widget”. You can add multiple instances of this widget, with each one displaying a single static image.

Another popular plugin for adding image-related widgets to your sidebar is the Photo Gallery plugin. In addition to allowing you to add a permanent photo gallery preview to your sidebar, you can also choose to display a miniature photo slideshow using images from your WordPress media library.