All this time I didn’t know you could exclude images from being part of the built-in WordPress Image Gallery feature. I always thought it was an “all or none” situation where all your post’s pictures showed up in its respective gallery. Only now did I learn about the exclude function of the gallery. The only (slightly) tricky part of this is finding the attachment ID of the excluded image, but that minor step is worth the effort.

Check out the WordPress Image Gallery support page for other allowable customizations.

Are you confused about what I’m talking about? Here’s an example. Check out this old post, Interesting Sights at Ala Moana. For this post, I uploaded a total of five images. Four of them are the Tokidoki patterns, and the last one is of the “snow” at Ala Moana. Since the four Tokidoki patterns make sense together, I want these to appear in a gallery with thumbnail views of the images. I could have shown each of the four images in a larger view, but I didn’t want to give up that much real estate, and the image gallery with 4 columns does a nice job. But, the typical behavior of the image gallery is to display all the images which includes the Ala Moana snow. That picture really doesn’t make sense in context of the other four, so I excluded it from displaying in the gallery. The image however is still part of the post and is seen individually at the end.