Show a Photo Gallery on your Site
Last updated: October 07 2024
For every e-commerce site, the photo galleries which showcase your products are undoubtedly necessary to gain customers’ trust and attention. However, adding a nicely-displayed photo gallery in Jekyll can be such a challenge for beginners and inexperienced people. With the purpose of solving the problem for people who have troubles implementing a photo gallery, this instructional writing on how to show a photo gallery on your site will be a great help for your website.
Depending on how the gallery will be shown, there are two solutions to your problem: using front matter and using collections. Please read these following steps carefully and learn how to show a photo gallery on your site.
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How to implement a photo gallery on your Jekyll site
The Front Matter method
This is the most suitable way for you to add the photo gallery on one page.
Step 1: Create photo-gallery.html
and add an array with image data
The first thing to do is forming photo-gallery.html
. Then, in the front matter, add an array with image data.
---
layout: default
images:
- image_path: /images/cakes/apple-pie.jpg
title: Apple Pie
- image_path: /images/cakes/birthday-cake.jpg
title: Birthday Cake
- image_path: /images/cakes/black-forest.jpg
title: Black Forest
- image_path: /images/cakes/brownie.jpg
title: Brownie
- image_path: /images/cakes/cheese-cake.jpg
title: Cheese Cake
- image_path: /images/cakes/chocolate-cake.jpg
title: Chocolate Cake
- image_path: /images/cakes/fruit-cake.jpg
title: Fruit Cake
- image_path: /images/cakes/lamington.jpg
title: Lamington
- image_path: /images/cakes/lemon-cake.jpg
title: Lemon Cake
---
Step 2: Loop over the array
After getting the data in front matter, in order to output the images in a grid, you need to loop over the array.
...
<ul class="photo-gallery">
{% for image in page.images %}
<li><img src="{{ image.image_path }}" alt="{{ image.title}}"/></li>
{% endfor %}
</ul>
Step 3: Add some CSS
Finally, adding some CSS will make your photo gallery display nicely.
Step 4: Adjust the functionality
If you want to reorder items and extend the structure to adjust the functionality, add a link field to the array.
...
- image_path: /images/cakes/lemon-cake.jpg
title: Lemon Cake
link: /lemon-cake.html
...
After that, you need to output the link in an a
when outputting the images
...
<ul class="photo-gallery">
{% for image in page.images %}
<li>
<a href="{{ image.link }}">
<img src="{{ image.image_path }}" alt="{{ image.title}}"/>
</a>
</li>
{% endfor %}
</ul>
The Collection method
If you want to display the photo gallery on multiple pages or have a lot of metadata for each image then this is the best method for you.
Step 1: Create a photo_gallery
collection
Firstly, create a photo_gallery
collection. You need to add metadata for a single image in each document in the collection, for instance, _photo_gallery/lemon-cake.md
.
---
image_path: /images/cakes/lemon-cake.jpg
title: Lemon Cake
---
Step 2: Iterate over the photo_gallery
collection
To iterate over the photo_gallery
collection, you can use liquid.
...
<ul class="photo-gallery">
{% for image in site.photo_gallery %}
<li><img src="{{ image.image_path }}" alt="{{ image.title}}"/></li>
{% endfor %}
</ul>
Step 3: Add a weight
variable
Weight
is a number that helps you to indicate the photo’s position. Therefore, you can decide the photo order by adding a weight
variable to the front matter of the documents in photo_gallery
.
---
image_path: /images/cakes/lemon-cake.jpg
title: Lemon Cake
weight: 1
---
Step 4: Order the collection documents
Finally, before outputting the photos, you have to order the collection documents by the weight
.
...
{% assign sorted_photos = site.photo_gallery | sort: "weight" %}
<ul class="photo-gallery">
{% for image in sorted_photos %}
<li><img src="{{ image.image_path }}" alt="{{ image.title}}"/></li>
{% endfor %}
</ul>
Conclusion
With this detailed tutorial on how to show a photo gallery on your site, we certainly ensure that you can manipulate those above steps and make your job easier. If you want to display a photo gallery using a JavaScript photo gallery, you can apply the same techniques. For lightSlider, it expects the elements in a simple <ul>
structure in the HTML. I hope this article has been helpful to you, you can check out our other articles on catalog if you want to learn more about this topic.