Image Galleries not visible with 3.5 "Add Media" feature

UPDATE: creating new posts with galleries works, but does NOT work with any slideshow plugin that uses galleries. In other words, if you create a gallery but remove the WP shortcode, it disappears. In all previous WP versions, this was not the case.

In other words, if you create a gallery but remove the WP shortcode, it disappears. In all previous WP versions, this was not the case.

It will still work as long as you are only including images in the gallery that are attached to the post.

thanks for the reply Drew. hm, i thought putting images in a post gallery attached the images to that post. if not, i don’t quite get the purpose of calling it attached. the images do show as “uploaded to” the appropriate post in the Media Library.

Interestingly, the gallery DOES show up correctly if I select Set Featured Image in the new Add Media interface and then select “uploaded to this post” from the pulldown menu. So it’s still there to some extent. However there is still no Edit Gallery function the way there is if you create a new gallery with the new interface.

Hopefully I’m making the issue clear, let me know if I need to clarify.

screenshots:

existing gallery has no edit feature:
https://ericforman.com/public/Existing%20Gallery%20has%20no%20Edit%20feature.PNG

but it IS visible if you use “Set featured Image” set to “uploaded to this post”:
https://ericforman.com/public/Existing%20Gallery%20is%20visible%20as%20uploaded.PNG

a new test gallery does have the edit feature
https://ericforman.com/public/New%20test%20gallery%20DOES%20have%20Edit%20feature.PNG

eric: On any of the various sidebars, you can select “Media Gallery” and then the “Uploaded to this Post” from the dropdown. Like in your first screenshot there, you’re on the upload files screen, not the “see existing files” screen. Click the Media Library, then there’s a dropdown to see the uploaded to this post files.

To edit any gallery, even pre-existing ones, you’re kinda in the wrong place. Back out of the media screen entirely, and look at the post in the Visual editor. You get that placeholder box with a camera icon in it. Click that box and in the top left will be a button that says “Edit Gallery”. Clicking this will take you to the new media screen with that gallery in the editor. Edit away.

Doing this will essentially replace the old gallery shortcode with the new one with the image id’s adjusted to your changes.

Basically, a “gallery” isn’t anything except for the shortcode. It’s not saved anywhere. The shortcode completely defines it. So to edit one, you have to select that one in the visual editor, and then tell it that you want to edit it. Otherwise it has no idea where the gallery you want to edit is.

Thanks Samuel. As I said, I am not using the shortcode, therefore there is no placeholder box in Visual editor. I don’t use the shortcode because the slideshow pulls from the gallery. In all previous versions of WP, the gallery was editable regardless of whether you chose to use WP’s shortcode and display method or not.

And yes, the gallery does exist without a shortcode. That’s what the “set featured image” screenshot demonstrates. Also my entire site has worked this way since WP 2. And it still works! Just to be clear, the gallery does display when viewing the site (using “cycle” slideshow plugin, without a shortcode). My problem is the new feature makes it impossible to see or edit the gallery.

Okay, then you really need to talk to the author of that plugin and see if he can update it to be compatible with WordPress 3.5.

Note that if you simply need to access the attached images, then you can do that just the way I said above. Go to the Media Library tab (in your first screenshot) and select the Uploaded images from the dropdown box to see the images attached to this post.

But that isn’t “editing the gallery”, in our terminology, because if you don’t have a shortcode, then you don’t *have* a gallery. What you have is just a bunch of images attached to a post. A gallery now has things like ordering and column settings and such. These are part of the shortcode. Without a shortcode there is no gallery.

no maybe i’m not being clear. the plugin continues to work fine. it’s the WP editor that i’m talking about. if i delete the plugin, the issue is the same. pre-existing galleries that are not displayed with shortcodes are not editable. is nobody else having this issue?

Looks like we cross-posted each other there. Check my response above yours.

ah ha, i see what you’re saying. you’re right that works. thank you!

however, i stand by my point about Galleries existing without shortcodes. I have always used the Gallery feature to re-order attached images. Any plugin that pulled from the gallery would see those edits. Using the shortcode or not was irrelevant.

I went back to a site with 3.4 to grab some screenshots to prove this.

post with a gallery:
https://ericforman.com/public/Gallery%20present%20without%20shortcode.PNG

that post has no shortcode:
https://ericforman.com/public/No%20shortcode.PNG

that post’s gallery displays without a shortcode:
https://ericforman.com/public/Gallery%20shows%20with%20slideshow.PNG

a collection of images you can edit and re-order should be called a gallery. how you display it is up to you, with WP’s gallery rendering or without. editing that gallery should be called “edit gallery.” that’s how it’s been, and is now no longer.

but thank you Samuel for the workaround! it’s good enough for now.

What you had was a plugin (or a theme, they can do this too) that was detecting not the actuall gallery but ‘images attached to this post.’ So .. the terminology was bad, and that’s a gaff. Sorry.

So your point is accurate, but we all used poor language in there to explain things ?? We should have had that gallery tab in 3.4.2 be ‘Attached to this post’ and not ‘gallery’.

Any plugin that grabbed images attached to a post and used that data to display should still work. If not, then they need to fix the plugin.

It was a bad choice of wording in the past, where “Gallery” was used to talk about “images attached to this post”. That’s not the case anymore, because “Gallery” now can be any set of images whatsoever, attached to any set of posts, or not attached to posts at all.

A “gallery” is divorced from posts now.