Introduction to Photogenic

Photogenic is a collection of templates and styles that enable you to build a powerful and beautiful photography website. Our theme demo shows you what can be done with the theme, but should not be taken literally – how you configure and build your website is up to you and the outcome will depend on the content you create. This article provides an overview of the theme and setup process, with detailed instructions  following.

Quick Setup

Setup time for this theme is estimated to take between 30 minutes and 4 hours, depending on the level of customization you intend to give it. For veteran WordPress users, setup should take less than 30 minutes. This guide provides detailed instructions for setup and configuration of WordPress and the theme. You may also access quick tips and links to documentation from within WordPress under Theme Options → Help, and inline from each WordPress screen under the Help link in the upper-right.

At a minimum, you must do the following:

1. Ensure Settings → Reading is set to Latest Posts
2. Ensure Settings → Permalinks is set to Post Name and Saved
3. Follow the core setup articles in this order for best results
   • Photogenic : Install Your Theme
     • If you already installed the theme and are a Themeforest customer, make sure you update the theme before continuing!
   • Photogenic: Setup Your Homepage
   • Photogenic: Configure Theme Options
   • Photogenic: Configure Your Widgets
   • Photogenic: Setup Your Menus
4. Ensure any existing content in your website is edited and refined for the new theme. The most important thing to understand is how images work in this theme, explained next.

Photogenic Image Sizes

The theme creates four versions of your images on upload. One of these copies is used in the theme’s templates or widgets depending on the image size it needs. This cropping and scaling feature is a core feature of WordPress which allows the theme to use only the smallest image possible to fit the requirement, which in turn speeds up your page loads and helps to ensure a uniform and clean look.

To begin, always upload the highest resolution photo possible, up to 2MB in file size or 2000px wide. These high-resolution versions are used by your lightbox plugin and also ensure your photos look their best everywhere in the site. The 2MB limit is imposed by WordPress by default. Your uploaded image will then be turned into these versions:

• 180×112  – cropped from center – used in widgets with small thumbnails
• 400×300  – cropped from center – used in widgets with medium-sized thumbnails, and in your album lists
• 600×338 – cropped from center – used in widgets with large thumbnails, the collage, and blog posts with a sidebar
• 1080 wide – uncropped – used in album lists or anywhere an image appears in a single column at “full” width.

If you have existing content in WordPress, see this article for how to regenerate all of your images to fit Photogenic properly:

How to Regenerate Images to Fit Theme Templates

Post Types, Page Templates & content Structure

Photogenic offers two standard content types (Posts and Pages) and one special post type, Albums.

Both posts and Albums have a page template which displays the posts in a special format. See our demo for examples of what these look like. Before your site will look like our demo at all, you must add some posts and albums, and one of each of these page templates. Once you’ve populated the albums with images and the album categories with albums,  you can then add them to your homepage via the Appearance → Widgets section in your WordPress administration area, which is explained in detail later.

Demo Content

1. Right-click the below link and choose Save File As or your browser equivalent
2. Unzip the downloaded file to find the photogenic_demo-content.xml file
3. Go to Tools → Import and click WordPress
4. If prompted to install the plugin, follow the steps to install and activate.
5. Browse to the photogenic_demo-content.xml file and click Upload and Import.
6. You will be prompted to import authors and users from our demo site. Select your name from each drop-down to assign posts to yourself so these users are not creted on your setup.
7. Click the "Download and import file attachments" box to attempt to import our demo images.

Download Demo XML

Customization

Homepage:  Photogenic includes three home page layouts (Blog, Collage and Widget-Driven) explained in more detail in the Setup Your Homepage article. The widget-driven homepage is the equivalent of a drag and drop layout.

Colors: For customization of the theme’s overall color scheme, you may use the WordPress Customizer, which includes several options for changing elements in Photogenic.

Layout: If you have some knowledge of CSS, you may further customize the theme’s styles or layouts using the Customization area of the Theme Options panel for storing Custom CSS.

Support

For help with common issues you may encounter, check out our Knowledgebase first. If you can’t find the answer there, head over to our Support page and post a request. You should receive a response within 24 hours on weekdays.

For help with modifying templates or changing functionality in your theme, feel free to post the question on our forums, but be advised you may be referred to one of our Approved Modifiers if your request requires testing/development to figure out, or is beyond your skill level to implement.