It took me a while to understand how this was done because I could not find the proper explanation on Imagely’s website or a video on their YouTube channel. I could not find it on other websites, they all explained the older method of using the singlepic shortcode. Imagely also shares this old method but in another post points to the use of a new shortcode. There is no clear answer to my question on their website. I didn’t want to use a shortcode because in the future, I would need to update all my posts to replace the shortcode.

It was late at night and I happened on the solution while taking a different path while following my workflow. I also finally understood how I could use multiple single images within the same blog post and not create new windows for each link back to the image lightbox.

The galleries are each a group of related images and I needed to think about them as from a faraway view. There’s the world globe, then the country, then the state, and last the city view when you consider looking from space down to where you are sitting. So each gallery name can be a state I visit in the United States, then I use Tags to isolate where in the state they were taken, like by city name or city and state abbreviation. Copying an image between Galleries made a duplicate of that image with a different image ID so that wasn’t helpful. I made an Album named All, where I insert each gallery by state name so that I can insert this album into my Photography page.

Then whenever I need to have a single image from any of these galleries appear on my blog post with a caption, I first add a custom tag to the image. For my purposes, I use “single color title of image” or “single bw title of image.” Under NextGen Gallery and Gallery Settings menu, I set default settings for Pro Blog Style. I set the width of the thumbnail in Image Display Size, set Display Captions to Yes, and set Display Triggers to Never. Click on Save Changes.

Then insert NextGEN Gallery in Block editor. Click on Add NextGEN Gallery. Under the default selection, Insert Into Page, Click on Galleries and change it to Tags, then search for “single ” and pick the tag of the image that I want. This means that I can use that single image in any blog post and it will not change the image ID. Select Pro Blog Style. Click on Insert Gallery.

Within the galleries update your image’s Alt Description to update the caption on the image within the blog post.

For my current style of writing, I’m not interested in floating the image left or right so I have not addressed these.