WordPress Gallery Needs Some Love – Excluding Photos Not User Friendly

The WordPress image gallery needs an easier way to remove photos from the gallery, and choose photos for the gallery. As of right now, if you click delete in a gallery, it will delete the image entirely from the media library (user may not be expecting this).

The gallery also unfortunately uses all images uploaded to the post. So, if you want to add another image that is not part of the gallery, it will automatically be added to the gallery.

The only solutions given in the forum are:

– Go into media area library separately and upload through there: The user will likely not know to do this until experiencing the problem in the first place, and it is not nice to have to open a new tab or navigate away whilst editing.

– Add excluded IDs to short tag: If you are inserting and editing the gallery from the visual editor, this would mean replacing that with a short code. It is also not easy to find the ID(s) to exclude, and annoying if you have a lot to exclude.

Borderline Bug: There also is the problem of featured posts being included in the gallery

Proposed Solution: Add ability to choose which images go in the gallery, and do not automatically added newly uploaded images to the gallery.