Having just had what I was determined to the last ever battle I ever have with WordPress over excluding certain images from a gallery that I wanted to embed in a post I went and looked it up.

Why on Earth WordPress, which has my unstinting support in every other regard for its brilliant platforms, still hasn’t addressed what amounts to the biggest ballache for me (any many, many more gathering from a quick Googling) is beyond me – and their support forums are full on inane ‘how to create a gallery’ videos or baffling technobabble, assuming they’re not telling people to go ask their questions somewhere else.

So, having twatted around with this for absolutely sodding ages, here’s my tutorial:

• Upload all of your images – galleries and non-gallery images
• Insert the gallery link
• Preview the post – then mouseover the images you want to exclude (put your cursor over the offending images until a pop-up, er, pops up.
• Make a note of the number that pops up – it should be a number between one and whatever you’re up to on numbers. It’s not the name you gave the file, or the name the image had before you downloaded it. It’s a numerical, plain and simple.
• Insert this code: [ gallery exclude=”your number here,your second number here”], remembering to include the numbers of the images you want rid of. If there’s just one then just exclude that one. (Remember too to close up the space between the opening bracket and the ‘g’ of ‘gallery’ – or it won’t work).

Jesus, why is this stuff so hard?