Image Gallery Source

The Image Gallery source lets you feed images directly into a FlipBook — perfect for photo books, comics, art portfolios, scanned magazines, recipe cards, or anything that lives as separate images. The plugin treats each image as one page.

When to use Image Gallery

Pick Image Gallery when:

  • Your content is already images (photos, scans, comic pages, illustrations).
  • You don't have a PDF of the content and don't want to make one.
  • You want simple, predictable rendering — each image becomes one page exactly as you uploaded it.

If you have a PDF, use Single PDF instead — it's lighter and supports text search.

Supported image formats

The image gallery accepts any image format WordPress supports, including:

  • JPG / JPEG — best for photos, scans of magazine pages, anything with gradients.
  • PNG — best for illustrations, comics with flat colors, anything with transparency.
  • WebP — modern format, smaller file size than JPG/PNG, supported by all modern browsers.
  • GIF — works but file sizes are usually large; convert to PNG or JPG for better performance.

Step-by-step

1. Open the FlipBook editor

Go to FlipBooks → Add New and type a title.

2. Pick Image Gallery

On the Content tab, click the Image Gallery card. The dropzone for image upload appears.

3. Upload your images

Three ways:

  • Drag and drop images from your computer onto the dropzone.
  • Click "Add from Media Library" to pick images already uploaded.
  • Click "Upload New" to open the WordPress media uploader.

You can drop a folder of images at once — they all upload in parallel.

4. Review the gallery preview

After upload, you see thumbnails of each image laid out in an A4-aspect grid (each thumbnail follows the FlipBook's expected page aspect). Confirm:

  • The right images are included.
  • They're in the right order.

5. Reorder if needed

Click and drag a thumbnail to move it earlier or later in the gallery. The thumbnail you're dragging follows your cursor; release on the target slot.

For larger galleries, drag-reordering is the only way to change order — there's no bulk re-sort option.

6. (Optional) Set image options

Each image has a small overlay on hover with:

  • Delete — remove this image from the gallery.
  • Name (optional) — display name for the image. Used in search results and the table of contents. Defaults to the filename.

7. Publish

Click Publish. The FlipBook is live.

What readers see

  • Each image becomes one FlipBook page.
  • Pages flip in the order you arranged the gallery.
  • Images render at their native resolution, scaled to fit the FlipBook frame.
  • Two-page spreads work the same as with PDFs — odd and even pages pair up automatically.

Best practices for image quality

Resolution

  • Aim for 1500–2000 pixels on the longer side. This looks crisp at 100% zoom and most reasonable zoom levels.
  • Higher than 3000px wastes bandwidth without visible improvement on most screens.
  • Lower than 1000px looks blurry when readers zoom in.

Format choice

  • Photos and scans → JPG (75–85 quality is plenty).
  • Illustrations, comics, line art → PNG.
  • Modern site, willing to use WebP → WebP at quality 75–80 (smallest file size).

Aspect ratio

  • Keep all images the same aspect ratio (e.g. all 3:4 portrait, or all 1:1 square).
  • Mixed aspect ratios work, but transitions look uneven.
  • A typical magazine ratio is 3:4 (similar to A4 portrait).

File size

  • Aim for under 500 KB per image for fastest loading.
  • For a 20-page book at 500 KB each, total weight is 10 MB — quick to load on most connections.
  • For 100-page books, consider compressing more aggressively (try 200–300 KB per image).

Common workflows

Photo book or art portfolio

  1. Resize all photos to a consistent width (e.g. 1500px wide).
  2. Compress with ImageOptim, Squoosh, or similar.
  3. Upload all at once.
  4. Drag-reorder to your preferred sequence.

Scanned magazine or comic

  1. Scan at 300 DPI for the source.
  2. Export each page at 1500–2000px on the longer side as JPG.
  3. Run OCR (if you want searchable text) — but note: OCR text on image-source FlipBooks isn't indexed (search isn't supported for image galleries). For searchable image-based books, generate a PDF with embedded text instead.
  4. Upload all pages, sorted by page number.

Mixed media campaign (e.g. catalog from a designer)

  1. Get your designer to export the catalog as a series of high-quality images (one per spread).
  2. Upload them, ensure ordering is correct.
  3. Add hotspots on top of each image for shop-now links, video popups, or jump-to-page actions.

What's not supported on Image Gallery FlipBooks

Some features are PDF-only and don't apply to image galleries:

  • Search — there's no text to search.
  • Read Aloud — no text to read out loud.
  • Print — disabled (images are visual, not paginated text content).
  • Download — original images can't be exported as a single PDF.
  • Form Viewer — no forms.

The toolbar auto-hides these buttons when source is Image Gallery, so readers don't see disabled controls.

Featured Image (cover)

By default, the first image in your gallery is used as the cover thumbnail in the Image Link block/shortcode.

If you want a different cover (perhaps a polished branded image that's not part of the gallery):

  1. Set the Featured Image in the publish sidebar.
  2. The Image Link block/shortcode with cover="true" uses the Featured Image instead of image #1.

Replacing or removing images

To remove an image:

  1. Hover over the thumbnail.
  2. Click the Delete (trash) icon.
  3. Save.

To replace an image with a different one, delete it and add the new one in its place. Or, edit the image in WordPress's media library directly to keep its position.

Troubleshooting

Images look pixelated at high zoom. Upload higher-resolution versions (1500–2000px on the longer side).

Pages render at different sizes. The gallery contains images with different aspect ratios. Make them consistent before re-uploading. The FlipBook scales each image to fit the page frame, so uneven aspects show as inconsistent margins.

Loading is slow on visitors' devices.

  • Compress your images more aggressively (target under 300 KB each).
  • Convert JPGs to WebP (often 50% smaller).
  • Reduce the gallery size if possible.

The page order looks wrong on the front end. The FlipBook reads the gallery in the saved order. If you reordered after publishing, save again — your changes apply on next page load.

Two-page spread looks broken. Page mode might be misaligned. Try the other Page Mode (Cover First vs. Spreads First) under General. For scan-based books, Cover First usually works best.

My image-based FlipBook would benefit from text search. Convert your images to a PDF with embedded OCR text (Adobe Acrobat → Recognize Text, or a free tool like Tesseract). Then upload that PDF using the Single PDF source instead. Best of both worlds: visual fidelity of images, searchability of PDF text.

Next steps

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