The photo gallery theme is pretty much what it says it is. You post your photos in the normal way, and use a custom field to include a cropped image. This cropped image is included on the home page and category pages as links to each single page.

There are two themes in the series, one with a dark background and one with a light background.

I decided to try the theme under three different circumstances: A brand new blog with no existing posts intended for one reason only and an existing photoblog with another theme.

The first thing I did after downloading the theme was to check out the read me file. This pointed me to two video tutorials on using the theme which showed me exactly how the main feature, the cropped images, worked. I installed the theme on a fresh installation of WordPress 2.5 (RC2) uploaded a few photographs and I was done.

The theme works using the build in functionality so there are no extra options to choose from. On a fresh installation there really isn’t a need for any either. The theme doesn’t add any functionality for cropping the photographs; however, while this might have been a pain on pre-2.5 installations the option to set the thumbnail size on WordPress 2.5 means that it can be all taken care of by the default .

This is a very valuable addition to WordPress and means that the theme needs to do far less work as a result.

Installing it on an existing photoblog proved to be a little more time consuming.

As I already had a lot of photographs I needed to create cropped versions of all of them. To do this I used Photoshops’s batch actions feature so this wasn’t a problem; however, I then faced the daunting prospect of adding these cropped versions as custom fields on all of the old photographs. I added some extra PHP to do this for me; however, if your not comfortable writing your own code then the manual process is probably going to take you a little while.

There are still some blank thumbnails on my installation where the images are hosted by Zoomr, meaning they were never uploaded to WordPress and my PHP won’t work. I am in the process of replacing each of these.

The other problem I faced, which I think is common to a lot of themes, is that the main menu works by listing the site’s pages. This is fine if you are starting a new blog and can restrict them to the pages you want in the menu; however, my existing blog has 20 or so additional pages that have accumulated over the years and this made the menu a little unwieldy. I ended up removing the theme tag and adding an html link.

This the first time I have used a theme that someone else has produced so I was unsure how well it work, or how much work I would have to put in to get it to work. I was pleasantly surprised. Although I made a few amendments to the theme to make it fit my particular circumstances I didn’t need to make any changes to the design side or the CSS and so in that respect it was easy to use and a good starting point had I wanted to make any other changes.

There are a few things that I would have liked to see in the theme.

Something which is practically a default in the photoblogging world is the ability to click the main photograph on single pages to view the next or previous shot. This theme includes links beneath the post which is entirely sufficient for practical purposes but with photographs the less content on the page the better.

Secondly, although there is a comment in the html to tell you where to place any comment code it isn’t included in the theme by default. I can understand why this is, after all the comment form does tend to take something away from the photograph and may not be desirable by many of the bloggers; however, I think that a pop-up link could have been included to good effect.

Finally, the theme comes in two flavours, light and dark. I would like to see these two combined with the default option selectable by the blogger. Ideally the blogger should have an option for each post to decide whether to go light or dark to suit the photograph.

I have passed all of these ideas onto the guys at iThemes so that they can consider them for future releases of this, or any other photblogging themes.

You can see my installation of the theme at http://www.arickmann.co.uk/collections/photography/

You can find more information on the photo gallery theme at iThemes’ Photo gallery page.