A few months ago I received suggested it might be a good idea to allow the gallery shortcode to retrieve attachments from a category as part of my Media Categories plugin.

So here it is, Media Categories 1.2 extends the native WordPress Gallery Shortcode to allow you to select a category to display via a newly added category parameter which can take either a term_id OR a slug.

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 [gallery category='slug']

Normally the gallery shortcode only shows you images that have been attached to the current post, or a post id passed as an argument. This normal behavior is preserved with Media Categories 1.2, however when invoking the ‘categories parameter, the current post is ignored, unless its id is explicitly passed.

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[gallery category='slug' id='12']

In the example above, the gallery shortcode will create a gallery of any images that in the category called slug AND are attached to post id=12. If the id is not explicitly passed, then it will simply return all images from the category.

As I’ve stated, if you don’t invoke the category parameter, the gallery shortcode will behave as normal, so this plugin will not interfere with how galleries already in use will behave.

I have a few additional updates coming soon for this plugin, per another request I received via the plugin directory forums, version 1.3 will include a filter so that developers can change the taxonomy at will.

Thanks for using the plugin, as always I appreciate bug reports and feature requests, I hope you find good use for this new feature.